


The Terror of Knowing

by girlbookwrm



Series: The Hundred Year Playlist [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (foiled by Bucky's stunningly deadly startle reflex), Angst and Feels, Art, Attempted Hydra Trash Party, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Blood, Blue Balls Iditarod, Brainwashing, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Child Soldiers, Hoo boy here we go, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Minor Character Death, Protective Bucky Barnes, Red Room (Marvel), Swearing, Torture, Violence, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, but according to my beta it's heartbreaking so Heed My Words, that's because this is ALL BUCK ALL THE TIME BABY, you will notice a distinct lack of Steven here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-03-28 09:43:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 37,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13901379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlbookwrm/pseuds/girlbookwrm
Summary: Later, the Soldier doesn’t know what‘s worse: the horror of  remembering, or the nameless fear of all the things he has forgotten.AKA Soldat’s Symphony in Suffering. Contents: Suffering™ of one (1) amnesiac amputee. Steve Rogers may be a Sweet Summer Child™, but memories or no memories, Bucky Barnes is a Bitter Winter Baby™ full of salt and sass. No amount of mindwipes can erase “fuck” from his vocabulary, and no amount of brainwashing can make him anything less than a sarcastic, overprotective asshole. Warning for Very Bad Russian and a cringingly inaccurate depiction of how to amnesia.





	1. Веселей, солдат, гляди!

**Author's Note:**

> _It's the **terror of knowing**_  
>  _What the world is about_  
>  _Watching some good friends_  
>  _Screaming 'Let me out'_  
>  \- [Under Pressure](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a01QQZyl-_I) by Queen and David Bowie, 1982.
> 
> [(Listen to the full series playlist on Spotify)](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4cO5vrDvCKErHEPtudEmEy)
> 
> Translation Note: Please forgive my Very Bad Russian (or feel free to yell at me and help improve it, I don't mind.) To lessen your pain, I have put in hovertext translations (sadly, they don't seem to work in mobile? I Tried.) If you want the True, Immersive Bucky Barnes Experience, ignore all the translations, because Baby Boy has not a clue as to what's going on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to know how the Barneses found out what happened to their sons, immediately before this story starts, and after the last story ends [there’s a B-Side for that.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15845442/chapters/41149292)

## Prelude

_-[Misirlou](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7pbkf6-ScY) Mediterranean Traditional. Originally recorded by Nikos Roubanis, 1927. Recorded by Jan August, 1946. Recorded by Dick Dale and his Del-Tones, 1962. Recorded by 2Cellos, 2011._

 

Later, in the museum, the Soldier doesn’t know what‘s worse: the horror of  remembering, or the nameless fear of all the things he may have forgotten. What is James Buchanan Barnes? A collection of cells? A beating heart? A smile and a uniform?

Is he a messy bundle of memories and experiences? A mother baking bread, sisters running and screaming, a father singing soft and low... Is he a strange amalgamation of songs heard and books read and lessons learned?  And what if those are taken away? What then? What’s left? Just a steady hand and a trigger finger?

Maybe it’s like Plato thought, like Aristophanes said, that he’s just a part of a whole person. Maybe, once upon a time, in some ancient past, he was a being with four legs and four arms, until some wrathful, jealous god split him in two. Is half of him walking around in someone else’s body, always looking for its missing pieces? Is he just an absence of something, blindly seeking someone?

Or is he nothing more than an animal thing, trapped at the bottom of a ravine, so desperate to live that he’ll take his father’s pocket knife and hack away the shredded pieces of his broken arm, just to be free again?

He shudders, and shakes off that memory. _You’re a goddamn drama queen is what you are,_ he thinks to himself, as he stares down the grainy images of a past that’s just coming back to him. _Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it must be fuckin’ contagious. That blonde putz really rubbed off on you._

Except he didn’t, did he. And isn’t that a crying goddamn shame.

 

 

 

## 1

 _Путь далёк у нас с тобою,_  
_**Веселей, солдат, гляди!**_

_-[В Путь](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyq7ZZQe8kU) by Vasily Solovyov-Sedoi and Mikhail Dudin, 1954._

 

The Winter Soldier is made of fear.

It is the first thing he knows, even before he knows that he is the Winter Soldier. He wakes up, alone, every inch of him bitten through with cold, near delirious with the pain. He has no memory of where he is, or how he got here, or what his goddamn name is.

 _Well fuck,_ he thinks, and the terror chokes him.

He looks down at himself and mother _fucker,_ he is pretty sure he's supposed to have two arms. Jesus Christ that's a lot of blood.

The worst part is, he looks at it and knows, just _knows_ that he cut that sucker off himself. He can't even say how, but he knows that it was crushed under something, and like a fox in a trap, he left a piece of himself behind, hoping for escape.

He isn't going to escape.

He's going to die here. God, he's going to die and he doesn't even know who he is.

Tears squeeze out of the corners of his eyes and freeze where they fall.

He waits for death.

 

It doesn't come.

 

 _Well shit,_ he thinks, eventually, and gets to his feet. It hurts. Everything hurts, obviously. And even though he cannot remember a time when it didn't goddamn hurt, he knows that this is pain, and that there is such a thing as a lack of pain.

He staggers away in a random direction, hoping vaguely that he isn’t the only person in the world. There is, he thinks, such a thing as help. Maybe he can find some.

 

He doesn't.

 

The snow falls harder, faster. A storm. He’s been walking for a long time, along the riverbed. Maybe for miles. The ravine has widened out and trees have come in around him. He keeps walking. He can’t stop now. His fear is white and blank like the snow around him, but he keeps walking. He… keeps…

He doesn't remember falling, but he's on his back in the snow. He's staring at the sky. His arm -- his stump, anyway -- isn't bleeding so much anymore. He doesn't know if that's good or bad. He's starting to feel warm. He doesn't know if that's good or bad either, but he'll call it a fucking improvement, thank you very much.

Maybe he's walked far enough. Maybe death can find him here.

He waits.

He listens to his own heart in his ears.

_Thu-thump. Thump-thump… thump… thump…_

 

* * *

 

This is not the first time he dies. It will not be the last.

 

* * *

 

His skin aches and burns all over. Like getting in a hot bath after a long walk in the cold -- when did that happen? His skin knows the feeling but his brain doesn’t know why. Can’t recall a specific instance, a specific walk or a specific bath. He just knows that’s what it feels like. Burning all over. The pain inside him, coming out, banging into the pain outside him, coming in.

He opens his eyes.

Snow. Sky.

Soldiers over him.

He looks down at himself. There is a stump where he thinks there should be an arm. But that doesn’t surprise him. He doesn’t know why that doesn’t surprise him. It’s bleeding (again, he thinks, though he doesn’t know why.) His heart is beating (again, he thinks, even though that’s impossible, isn’t it? Evidently not, he thinks, reasonably enough.)

“Дерьмо! Он жив,” says a voice overhead. He doesn’t know the words.

He closes his eyes. He drifts.

 

There are hands -- someone is touching his shoulder and without thinking, he lashes out, strikes with his legs. His hand -- his one hand, palms at his jacket automatically. There a handle under his fingers, a knife in his hand, and then he strikes. A slick feeling, a rush of hot wet sticky over his hand, a scream, and it is sticking out of the man’s neck. The man who was  touching him. The man in the Russian uniform. (How does he know that is a Russian uniform?)

Pain explodes at the back of his head.

The world goes white.

 

* * *

 

He wakes. (Again?) His head aches like a sunovabitch. He has no idea where he is, who he is. He opens his eyes. There’s a low concrete ceiling overhead. He tries to sit up and he’s--

He can’t move his arms, his legs. He looks down, he only has one arm: the other is a bandage-wrapped stump. There are straps, holding him in place: across his arm, his chest, his legs. This has happened before, his body knows it. This happened before, this happened, this --

The fear is so thick he can’t form words, even in his own head.

“Кто ты?” He jerks his head up, around. There’s a woman. She’s younger than him by a few years, he thinks, without really knowing what makes him think that. She’s standing in a far corner of the room. She looks as scared as he is. He can’t understand her.

“Wer bist du?” she says, in a different way. He almost understands this, his brain trying to summon up the--

“Tu chi sei?” she says, after a moment. He can taste something in the back of his throat. Wine. But he doesn’t know what the words mean.

“Qui es-tu?” she says. He knows this, he knows this -- it smells like cordite and explosives, the harsh smoke of burning and the sweet smoke of tobacco, but he doesn’t know why that is. And he can’t find an answer that matches. Can’t find the right words.

“Who are you?” she says, and her voice is strange and thick sounding to him. Too deep in her chest, too lingering on the r.

The words come out of him before he knows he’s going to speak. “Lady, I got no fuckin’ idea.”

Her eyes widen. “Боже мой,” she says. “Karpov был прав.”

Only one word of that sticks in his aching head. “Karpov?” he says, confused.

 

They call him “the American,” though he isn’t sure what that is. It gives him strange echoes in his head. A thick smell of garbage and exhaust; raucous, nasal accents, loud laughter, the crack of a ball and a rising cheer and -- and --

He doesn’t tell them about the echoes. They are jumbled, disconnected -- too much and not enough all at the same time. He’s fuckin _nuts,_ is what he is. He belongs in a goddamn bughouse. Maybe this is a bughouse. Maybe these weirdos are loony bin doctors. They frighten him, with their thick accents and their strange clothes. They are frightened of him in return. He is a danger, they say, to himself and others. “Okay,” he says, unsure. He doesn’t feel dangerous. He doesn’t see how a one-armed American is a danger to anyone, but…

They are afraid of him. His fear feeds off their fear.

But there is an uneasy truce. They feed him, and he was _ravenous_ . He shoves the food in his mouth like an animal, one-handed. _What were you raised by wolves?_ says a voice in his head. A woman’s voice. He can also hear her saying _feh!_ But he doesn’t know who she is. And he doesn’t stop shoveling food in his mouth. He’s too hungry to do otherwise, and for all he knows he was raised by wolves.

When he’s done, they show him to a room with a bed. He sleeps like the dead.

 

The next day, he scratches at the bandages on his stump so much that the doctors take them off, thinking that there must be infection. There is no infection. There is pink new skin closing over the wound. It is thin and raw and itchy as all hell. The doctors freak the fuck out about that, which makes him think maybe that isn’t supposed to happen?

“No,” says the woman, when he asks her about it. She’s a secretary, he thinks. “You’re doing very well. Better than they thought. They’re excited about it.”

“I don’t feel very fuckin’ reassured,” he mutters. She doesn’t translate that.

They take samples -- his blood, his hair, a small scrape of skin from his stump -- the skin is so new that the pain of that radiates through him and he thrashes, bucks against the restraints and screams and screams. The doctors flee quickly, but the woman stays with him as he comes down from the pain of it.

She tries to reassure him, but she’s too frightened to actually touch him.

 _I’m dangerous,_ he thinks. _She’s scared of me because I’m dangerous._

He doesn’t feel dangerous. But maybe dangerous people don’t.

 

The third day, his head hurts. They give him something for the pain, but it doesn’t help. He sits in his room, on his cot, and presses the heel of his one remaining hand against the middle of his forehead where the headache is pounding and --

_\--hands slapping against his in a swift, regular rhythm and Becca’s high voice “--cake, patty cake, baker’s--”_

_\--Ma’s lighting the candles, but she gets too close and hisses in pain. She shakes her hand sharply, then shoves her burned thumb in her mouth. “Son of a bitch...” she says, with her voice muffled by the--_

_\-- “-cky!” Steve shouts, terrified. He’s clinging to the side of the train, every muscle in him straining to hold on, fighting against the biting wind. “Grab my hand!” Steve’s hand is just there, he just needs to reach a little further, but he can feel the bar giving way. Steve’s eyes are so blue, so wide, so frightened. “No!”_

_He’s falling--_

_He’s screaming--_

_He’s--_

He is _actually_ screaming, and hammering his fist on the door, and when it opens, he throws himself out through it and attacks the first person who comes at him, twists them around and gets his one good hand around their throat and--

_\--in the trenches -- the fucking Nazis, they’re in the fucking trenches with him and his fucking gun jammed, so he just gets his arm around the first guy’s throat and squeezes, choking--_

He takes the guy’s gun, and he runs down the corridor. An alarm starts blaring. He shoots everyone he sees. He has to get out he--

_\--they’ve got two minutes left till the building blows, so they’re running, his eyes fixed on that fucking shield, the goddamn target on Steve’s broad back--_

He comes around a corner and _bang_. He sees white and falls back, and cracks the back of his skull against the cement. He stares up, vision swimming. A figure steps into view. It’s the woman, the secretary. She’s holding a metal bar. He can feel blood trickling hot down his face, pooling behind his head.

“Что вы наделали?” someone says. It’s a scientist, he sees when the man steps into view.

“Я спасла наши жизни,” she replies, harsh. She’s breathing hard, he notices through a fading haze of pain. She’s terrified, he realizes. She’s scared of him. She’s scared of dying.

He knows the fucking feeling.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes. (Again?) He aches all over. (Like stepping into hot water after too long in the snow. How does he know?) He has no idea where he is, who he is. He is cold. So cold. He is shivering, uncontrollably. He opens his eyes.

There are two men with guns pointed at him. He tenses, feels straps against his chest, his legs, his one arm. There is a woman. She’s about his age, he thinks, without really knowing what makes him think that. She’s standing between the two men with their guns pointed at him. She doesn’t look scared.

“You know who I am?” she asks, eyes narrowed, sharp. Like maybe he should.

He doesn’t. He shakes his head.

“Do you know who _you_ are?” she asks.

“Lady,” he manages. Does ice flake from his lips? His teeth are chattering. “I got no fuckin’ idea.”

 

They tell him that he’s been sick, and that they need to do some tests. They have needles, and swabs, and painkillers -- they tell him that they’re painkillers, but they keep having to try different things, and eventually they make him feel kind of woozy, weird and relaxed. But it doesn’t last very long. They keep having to give him more. They listen to his heart, his lungs. They take lots of pictures. They examine the stump of his arm: the scarring is old, pale, well-healed.

 

On the third night, he gets a headache, and they give him something for it, but it doesn’t stop the wave of --

 _\--leans against Steve, who can bear his weight easily now. His forehead presses against the side of Steve’s neck, and it’s_ hot, _skin burning against Bucky’s. “You runnin’ a fever, Rogers?” he asks, an old fear coming back--_

_\--looking up and seeing the figure, emaciated, golden, lit from below by candlelight, and a voice saying “in nomine patrii, et filii, et spiritu sancti” and--_

_\--“Кто ты?” He jerks his head up, around. There’s a woman. She’s younger than him by a few years, he thinks, without really knowing--_

The woman -- it’s the same woman, the same-- But she’s older, now, she’s _older._ He’s missing time.

He’s missing _years._

 

This time, he kills three guards before they take him down, piling on and jabbing him with needles until his muscles go limp and he stops struggling. The woman is standing over him, looking annoyed. “Take him to the freezer,” she says. “We’ll have to try something else.”

 

* * *

 

He wakes. (Again.) He aches all over (like he’s warming up after fever chills, coming back into his own skin). He has no idea where he is, who he is. He opens his eyes.

He is in a dark hole: a prison cell with a cot, a toilet, a sink, and nothing else. The only light comes through the grating overhead. He only has one arm. There is no one there.

 

They deliver food to him once a day. The food comes three times before the headache happens. It’s strong enough that he thinks he’s going to die from it. He thinks he’s going to be sick. He curls on his cot, hand fisted in his lanky hair, pulling hard.

He remembers --

And remembers --

And _remembers --_

He remembers everything.

“Mother _fuckers!”_ he howls.

 

He gives up shouting at the guards when he realizes that they don’t understand him. They’re Russians. He wonders if he served with any of them on the front, back in the war. He never picked up much Russian: a few swears (very useful) and some questions (less useful.) But when he stammers out a request to speak to Major Karpov, one of them looks at him oddly. He says: _“General_ Karpov?” In Russian, and Bucky feels cold all over.

He needs to sit. His knees are shaking. He presses his back to the wall and sinks down, sitting in the corner of his cell. His _oubliette,_  he thinks. He tries to breathe. His head still aches. He’s still… his mind is a mess, a scattered, shattered thing. None of this makes any sense.

He tries to piece together some broken Russian. “Какие… год?” He thinks they’re the right words. _What year?_

The guards just look confused, peering down at him through the round grate, then looking at each other, then back down at him. “тысяча девятьсот пятидесятый год?” one of them says, slowly.

Bucky has no idea what it means. He puts his aching head between his knees. He tries to remember how to breathe.

He remembers forgetting. He keeps forgetting who he is, and just that is enough to make him feel crazy. Because he _is_ fucking crazy. This is _crazy._

He remembers falling, remembers hacking his crushed fucking arm off with a goddamn pocket knife, remembers waking up and not knowing who he was, where he was. He remembers dying. He’s sure he died. After he fell, and then maybe again in the snow. And he thinks the Russians killed him a couple of times…

He starts to shake.

Shit. Fuck. Shit, shit, shit, _what is he? What did they do to him?_

He’d had his suspicions before, during the war, taking shrapnel wounds that healed too fast, Morita looking confused, suspicious. He remembers Steve telling him about how he could see colors so much more clearly after the serum, and hear everything, even heartbeats. He remembers realizing, with a horrified twist in his gut, that the strange dissonant thrumming he could hear all the time was just that: heartbeats. He remembers being able to smell everything, sickeningly vivid in his nose: the reek of blood, the smell of all the individual rations, tacky pine smells and Steve --

_Steve._

Bucky curls tighter, pulling his one arm in to his chest, clutching at the neck of his shirt. Steve will have no idea, _no idea_ that Bucky’s here. Who’s watching Steve’s back now?

Is he even alive?

Well, hell. If he’s like Bucky. If Bucky’s like him, if…

If whatever Zola gave him was anything like what Steve got.

 

Sometimes the food is drugged and when he wakes up, he can tell that they’ve been taking his blood, little slivers of skin, shaving patches out of his hair. Taking bits of him to study, like he’s a goddamn lab rat again. Which makes sense. With a sick lurch, he remembers what Karpov said (General Karpov, now, apparently): _I would like twenty of him, and a_ hundred _of him, please,_ with a bright, eager smile in Bucky’s direction. Just the thought of it makes his skin crawl.

The days are endless and incredibly boring. He does one-armed push-ups. He shadowboxes, does lopsided jumping jacks. He tries climbing the walls (literally) but even with his strength, he can’t quite make it. He starts to waste away, and thinks of Steve scarfing down double rations. They give him more food when they notice. He eats it grimly, and stops losing weight, at least. He needs to be strong, to be healthy, if he’s gonna have any kind of chance of getting out of here.

He tries to work out how many days. It’s a lot. His eyes have adjusted to the dark, but he’s…

Fuck. He’s lonely. The only contact he has is either while unconscious or awkward one-sided conversations with the guards.

He misses Steve.

He misses the guys -- even fucking Dum Dum. He misses his ma, his pa. He misses the hell out of Becca and Jeanie and Susan. He misses little Judith, wonders if she’s okay.

It’s too fucking quiet down here. He sings constantly, to keep himself sane and annoy his guards. Old songs from his childhood, the jazzy tunes he used to dance to, the dirty French songs that Dernier taught them all. At first, the guards bang on the grate, wanting him to shut up, but in the end…

Well. After a while they start making requests, in the scraps of English they’ve picked up from him. “No!” they say. “Not that one, do--” and then they hum a bar or two. Sometimes he obliges, but mostly he’ll say “Listen pal, I ain’t the fucking house band!” and sing something else, even louder, out of spite.

It’s a strange kind of friendship, but starved for contact as he is, he’s -- he could always --

_\--“You could make friends with anyone, Bucky,” says Steve, shaking his head in wonderment. “You could talk Hitler into giving you Berlin, I swear to God.”--_

 

The guards start to teach him Russian. It doesn’t take as long as he thinks it probably ought to. The guards are impressed. The scientists are giddy.

Until he starts asking questions.

“What year is it?”

“Is the war over?”

“What happened to Captain America?”

The guards clam up. They must have been told not to tell him anything, but…

 

They give him drugs in his food again. But this time, he doesn’t wake up.

 

* * *

 

He wakes. (Again, Jesus Christ.) He aches all over (like he’s got bruises fuckin’ everywhere). He has no idea where he is, who he is. He opens his eyes.

He is lying in a bed, in a room. The room is red. There is a woman beside him, looking worried. She’s a few years older than him, he thinks. Maybe five or six. She smiles when she sees him.

What?

“You’re awake,” she says. “It’s alright, you’re safe here.” She’s speaking Russian. Is he Russian? He can understand her. He must be Russian.

 

They tell him that he’s a soldier, that she’s his sister, that he lost his arm and hit his head. They’re trying to get him back on his feet, they say. They put him on a thing like an overturned tank tread (a treadmill, they tell him). They have him punch a foam block with his one hand. He punches through it. They test his reflexes. His reflexes are good.

He speaks Russian all the time, now, but as the hours pass, the words sound stranger and stranger in his head. He tries to stay calm about that. There’s something wrong with his brain, they say, and if he finds himself having any strange thoughts, he should tell them right away.

He doesn’t trust them. But he wishes he could. He’s so scared.

 

His hearing is extremely good, but they don’t ask him about his hearing, so he doesn’t tell them that.

He can overhear the woman -- his sister, they keep telling him she’s his sister -- talking to one of the doctors in the next room. “They may be on our side, but I don’t trust him. He’s a traitor, no matter how he pretties it up with lies and groveling. What’s more, he’s a German. The Soldier--” that’s him, he thinks, _that’s me,_ “--belongs to Russia. If Zola wants him, he’ll have to pry him from my cold, dead hands.”

“He’s Swiss, actually. Not German.”

 

The next day, the Soldier remembers.

She’s not his fucking sister.

He kills her first.

 

He is screaming when they take him back to the freezer. It’s the first time he’s awake when it happens. They strap him into the chair, and slam the door. He howls and spits and swears until the tiny room fills with air so cold it burns him and--

 

* * *

 

He wakes. He is strapped down, in a small room, and he is shivering so violently that the straps rattle against the sides of the chair. He has no idea who he is, where he is. There is a man standing in the open door of the small room. He has a beard, but he looks young.

“This is what we have to work with?” the man says, in Russian. “How long does it last?”

There is another man standing behind him, with the air of a soldier standing to attention. “The notes say that he is generally pliable for the first three days. Then, headaches. Memories return. They have theorized that it’s the brain self-repairing somehow: seems to prioritize life-threatening injuries, then works steadily to repair more peripheral damage. He becomes more and more unstable. Violent. But especially in the beginning, he’s like this.” The man waves a hand, gesturing at the way he is strapped down.

Like what? Shaking? Terrified? Desperately afraid and confused and aching?

“Compliant,” the second man says to the man with the beard.

“Well. Let's see what we're working with.”

 

They take him from the small room, and have him do tests. They test his reflexes, his strength. They test his brain. They tell him things and ask him questions. They make him watch bright flashing videos that make his head ache, and then ask him questions about what he saw. They ask him what he remembers.

He remembers nothing. He doesn't know who he is, where he is. If he is compliant, he thinks…

Maybe they won't put him back in the small, cold room again.

 

On the second day, new people arrive. They don’t speak Russian. They speak English. They bring in a metal box, long and narrow, like a coffin. He immediately doesn’t like it. They order him to lie down inside, and he does, but he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t like--

They close the lid.

His heartbeat thunders in his ears at the close space, the narrow window. He's so frightened. He's so--

“Ready for transport,”one of them says. He can barely hear it over the sounds of his own sharp, shallow breathing. It echoes off the interior of the tank, filling his head.

And then; the ice.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes. (Not again.) He aches all over (like he hasn’t slept in days.) He has no idea where he is, who he is. It feels like he’s moving. Rolling, or reeling... He opens his eyes. Lights flash by overhead. He can hear a sound -- a wheel squeaking. He’s on a gurney.

“He’s waking up. Turn up the drip,” someone says, with an edge of fear in their voice. They’re speaking English. He sounds… like he’s from out West somewhere. California, maybe?

He fades out.

 

He wakes in the middle of the surgery. They’re hacking at the stump of his arm with a saw. “Up the dosage again, he can take it,” someone is saying (not him, not _him,_ please, oh god, please--) “We can’t have him waking now. The procedure has already started.”

He fades out.

 

His shoulder aches. He feels -- his arm is cold. His left arm. It’s freezing. He lifts his hands and--

Oh god. Oh fucking shit, Jesus Christ--

Mismatched hands. One flesh, the other metal, shiny, glinting under the lights. But… it’s his. He can move it. He flexes it into a fist. It feels strange. He can sense the pressure of his unyielding metal fingers pressing into his unyielding metal palm, but there’s only that. And cold, radiating out into his shoulder, aching.

A man is coming over, and fear tears at his chest. They’ve already done this to him, what else is coming?

His metal hand shoots out, grabs the throat. He squeezes hard, lifts him up. He can hear gears whining in his forearm, his grip tightens with a crunch and--

There’s a sharp jab of something in his thigh.

A man with glasses. He smiles. “Sergeant Barnes.”

Who?

He fades out.

 

“The Russians want him back,” says someone. He doesn’t recognize the voice. “They’ve got a new wonder boy, one of Fenhoff’s little disciples. Says he can turn the science experiment into an asset. A real, tactical asset. I don’t know how in the hell they’re planning to control--”

“Brainwashing, if my spies are correct,” says the man with the glasses. His voice is different. Swiss. He’s Swiss. “Well. Let them. Put him on ice. We’ll send him back.”

The Swiss guy, he had said -- _Sergeant Barnes --_

“Who am I?” he asks, voice a croak in his own ears. The Swiss guy with the glasses and the American guy he’d been talking to, they both turn to look at him.

“Oh _shit,”_ says the American. He looks terrified. He brings a radio to his mouth. “The Soldier is awake, send backup, we need--”

He breaks the restraints, grabs the radio with his flesh hand and crunches it into broken plastic, twisted metal. He sends the American flying with his metal fist and whirls on the Swiss man. “Who am I?” he repeats, in a furious bellow.

A door bursts open behind him. He feels the jab of darts in his back. The muscles immediately go lax. And then he’s on his knees. The Swiss man smiles, shakily at first.

“Wha… what am I?” the Soldier asks, words slurring together, panic and drugs and adrenaline mixing in his head. A thick cocktail of confusion.

“You will be the new fist of Hydra,” says the man with the glasses.

 _Fuck you, buddy,_  the Soldier thinks, and the terror chokes him.

 

He wakes in the tank. There is a small glass window in front of him, metal on all sides. His breathing echoes back at him. Fast. Faster. He can smell his own fear, and a harsh smell, chemicals. He can hear—

Distant. Echoing. Voices. He holds his breath, to listen.

“--not have been possible on a less resilient subject,” says the Swiss man. “But we do what we can with the available technology,” he adds, simpering, “Do we not, Comrade Lukin?”

“Are we comrades?” asks a Russian voice. Chilly and unfriendly sounding. “Hm. If you say so. But it works, this… prosthetic?”

“The Vibranium alloy shell is all but indestructible. The mechanics within are designed for durability, for strength. We had to apply extensive reinforcements, along the scapula and across the ribs, bracing on the spine as well, to ensure that he can bear the weight of it, but yes. I assure you that it will operate just as we might hope.”

“We shall see,” Lukin says. “And this new tank you have designed. The portability, very useful. The base in Siberia is very remote, but the power requirements cannot be met anywhere else. I would be curious to know how this one meets those requirements without needing to be plugged in.”

“Its battery units are of a special sort, very expensive, but designed for portability.” The Swiss man sounds vaguely irritated by the question -- cool and distant.

“By whom?”

“Excuse me?”

“Designed by whom?” Lukin says.

A pause. “By me, of course,” says the Swiss man.

Inside the tank, the Soldier turns his head, looks around. Cold metal on all sides. There is a metal plate over his head, a little disc of tin, like a dog tag. A logo: the outline of it like the nose of a bullet train: sleek, racing towards the future. The name inside: _Stark._

He shivers and then stills himself when the arm -- the _metal_ arm -- rattles against the tank.

“Shall I show you how the freezing process works?” Zola says.

“Please.”

He looks back to the little window. Two figures are there, little more than silhouettes against the bright lights. Then, the lights dim. And suddenly, he can--

His reflection, in the round window--

That’s him, that’s _him_. He knows that face, he--

The tank comes to life around him, hissing. The chemical smell intensifies, and the cold, _the cold--_

He reaches out, his hand -- the metal hand, riming over with frost.

 _Thu-thump, thu-thump,_ goes his heart, as the cold burns and bites into him, hissing like snakes. _Thump-thump… thump thump… thump… thump…_

And then, the nothingness.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELCOME TO THE WINTER SOLDIER WONDERLAND. Seven chapters of bad russian, murder, and fun! As long as you find amnesia and suffering to be Fun.
> 
> Notes:  
> For anyone keeping track who is confused, this chapter covers 1945-1954, during which time Bucky is a one-armed science experiment for the Red Room. The time period where he's awake long enough to remember who he is happens in 1950. In 1954 the newly founded American Branch of Hydra (led by Zola, obv) reaches out with their slimy tentacle hands and offers to give their supersoldier a spiffy new arm. This is all headcanoning on my part but it's heavily influenced by mandarou's ['Til the End of the Timeline,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10878852/chapters/24765912)
> 
> the unsung hero of this is, of course, the nameless OC secretary, a proto-Madame B who goes from polyglot underling to HBIC in less than ten years in the goddamn 40s, only to have her career cut tragically short by an unstable amnesiac superhero. RIP Boss Ass Bitch Secretary. We Hardly Knew Ye.
> 
> Also, clearly, I headcanon Steve and Bucky as functionally immortal. Because I'm sorry, being frozen solid kills you. It kills you dead. That's how ice works. If you can be repeatedly frozen and thawed without significant loss of functionality then Congratulations You Are Immortal, You Are A Human Tardigrade, Good Work. (PS I encourage you to headcanon Steve and Bucky as functionally immortal, because if they are, then I'm sorry, Stucky is endgame and everyone else is Just Wrong.)
> 
> if this is your first outing with me, check out the previous fics in the series, and also hey you can check out my [fic-writin' tumblr](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/) for more Marvel nonsense.


	2. Traîner mes os, jusqu'au soleil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> add tag: minor character death. _i'm so sorry_

## 2

 _Mais qu'est-ce que j'aurais bien aimé_  
_Encore une fois **traîner mes os**_  
_**Jusqu'au soleil** jusqu'à l'été_  
_Jusqu'au printemps, jusqu'à demain_

_-[J’arrive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBHfoGrJLqI) by Jacques Brel, 1968._

 

Much later, he works out that it took about ten years to brainwash him. He categorizes the processes used in his notebooks.  

> 1) Trigger word conditioning: code phrases used to induce a certain state of confusion and blank-slate obedience.
> 
> 2) Memory implantation: use of prerecorded audio, drugs, and photographs to suggest false recollections.
> 
> 3) Physical conditioning, to train him for combat and in the use of the Arm.

The thing about brainwashing is that it’s repetitive as fuck and therefore kind of boring. It's like brushing your teeth in the morning, or chewing before you swallow. It works because it's habit. It's rote. It's especially boring and repetitive if you're the kind of guy who really only needs to be taught something once. In fact, all his super abilities probably make him more susceptible to the brainwashing. His muscles have better-than-usual memory, and know things even when his brain is still trying to heal its way through all the ice crystals and scar tissue. His body remembers while his brain is still trying to find itself.

It goes like this:

They wake him up. He doesn’t know who he is. They hammer home the message, again, again, again. Then, back in the tank. When he wakes up, the mind has forgotten. But the body remembers what it learned before.

And then they start over.

They've got some very fucking specific messages for him, applied like paint layered on thick and choppy. Each time he goes back in the tank, it's like a layer of blank white, so they can start again. But the paint is still there, underneath, changing the shape of the canvas, making it thick with ridges, the shapes of old paintings underneath still showing through. They turn him from a clean canvas into their piece of fucked up art in ten shades of crazy.

 

* * *

 

Желание

He wakes up in the dark.

He has no memories, no self, he is no one, a blank slate. There is terror in that. Blankness. Nothingness. He is alone, completely alone, in cave blackness, the kind of blackness that creeps with tricks of the mind. Желание, желание, желание, echoes in his head. He longs. He longs to be something. He longs for the darkness to stop, for the fear to stop, the terror of not knowing who he is is thick in his throat. He is nothing, he is nothing.

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. There are weights. Exercises, to strengthen his back, his legs, his shoulders. They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. He runs. Lap after lap after lap, with men timing him, others monitoring him. He runs all day. He runs until he collapses. They make notes. They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up --  _Your name is Drakov Ilyich Baranovsky. You were born in Stalingrad Oblast. Your father Ilya and your mother Lyudmila and your sister Sveta all died in the war --_  they put him back in the tank.

 

Ржавый

He wakes up in a training room.

Soldier. He is a soldier. They give him that. It is better than the nothingness that his body remembers. It is better than the dark, the isolation. He can fight. Ржавый. He has two hands. One for shooting, and one for everything else. He must go faster, must be stronger. He is a soldier, a soldier. Ржавый _,_ ржавый _._ The arm never rusts, but it can be covered in rusty stains, from the shoulder, if he swings it too hard for too long. The scars where his skin meets the metal re-open and cover the metal in smears of blood. That is a limit. He learns his limits. His body learns its limits.

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. This is a Walther P38, this is a Mauser C96, a model XVIII .25 caliber, a Luger. Eject magazine, reload. This is an MP40, a Thompson M1928, a Lanchester Mk. I. Disassemble, clean, reassemble. This is an Armalite AR-7, an AR-10, a Mauser Karabiner 98K, an Energa Rifle Grenade. Ready, aim, fire. Do it again. Do it again. Do it blindfolded. They put him back in the tank.

 

Семнадцать

He wakes up in a warm bed.

There are brightly colored pictures on the walls. They smile. семнадцать _._

They take care of him. They show him how to take care of himself. _This is how much you need to eat, this is how long you need to sleep, this is how you maintain your arm, this is how to smile. We care for you,_ they say. _We will take care of you,_  they say. Семнадцать _,_ семнадцать _,_ is in his head as they do. _Mother Russia cares for you. Trust us._ Семнадцать.

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up --  _This is your baby sister Sveta, she was blonde and pretty and crushed by a falling building along with mama and papa. These are the songs you learned as a child. These are the songs you learned when you joined the army. This is what you saw there. You were a hero. This is how you were injured in the line of duty: your arm, your head. This is why your memory is fuzzy, confused. You cannot trust your memory. Trust what we have told you: these are facts --_  they put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. For three days all he does is balancing exercises. The arm is heavy. There is a gymnast, a ballerina. They teach him. They put him on the balance beam until he does not fall. Plié, arabesque, spin, spin spin, on his toes. Pommel horse -- slap, slap, slap, hands against metal and leather, with the weight of his body swinging and spinning. The music flows around him and he makes slow arcs with his arms. The rings rattle and thunk as he pulls his body up into the Iron Cross and holds it, and holds it, and holds it. He goes up on his toes, then lifts one leg up and he holds it, holds it, holds it. They put him on the uneven bars; around and around and around until the bar snapped under the weight of him, when he squeezed too hard and shredded the wood with the metal hand. When he has mastered the balance and weight of his body, the guards shoot the gymnast and the ballerina in the head. He tries to kill the guards, shouting, enraged. _You bastards! You bastards! Motherfuckers!_ They beat him until he cannot move anymore. They put him back in the tank.

 

Рассвет

He wakes up--

 _Рассвет_ and they punish him, he has been disobedient. _Рассвет_ and the electricity arcs through his flesh, along his arm. _Рассвет_ because this is how we treat non-compliance. _Рассвет_ \-- we’re doing this for you, soldier. _Рассвет_ because order only comes through pain.

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. They give him knives, and show him how to use them. It is a dance. His body aches. He doesn’t know why. The dance with the knives is soothing. And then they show him: hold them, like this. Their hands show him, and he flinches from the touch. “Hold still, Soldat.” They show him how the knives are thrown. _Thok. Thok. Thok._ They land in the middles of the targets, even when the targets move. It is peaceful. _Thok. Thok. Thok._ He likes knives. Liking is non-compliant. He is not supposed to have opinions, but. They do not need to know about this. _Thok. Thok. Thok._ In the middles of the targets. He likes this. They put him back in the tank.

 

Печь

He wakes up (again, Jesus Christ.)

He is stronger than the pain. They teach him this. Печь.This is how to keep going when it hurts. This is how you keep breathing when the pain is everywhere. You do not need to fear the pain (he does, he still does, he never stops being afraid.) Печь.This is what your body can take. You know your limits. Everything short of them is irrelevant. Печь.He is unstoppable.

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. There are injections, experimental -- things that make him feel _so awake._  like the walls are crawling, like he can see sounds and smell colors. _Jesus Christ,_ he thinks, staring at the swirls of vivid streaking colors. They put him back in the tank.

 

Девять

He wakes up (when will it be over?)

This is what he needs to know: the borders of his motherland, the borders of the otherlands. He’s bored out of his skull. He fuckin’ hates geography. They show him where the safehouses are, how to find the depots, and what will be inside them. These are the languages he speaks. This is how to smile, how to drive a car, a motorcycle. This is how to fly a plane, a helicopter. This is how to disappear in a crowd. He knows many things. These are all the things he needs to know to do what must be done. Девять. He must remember it all. Девять.He must remember all that he has seen, all that he has learned. Девять,девять,девять.

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. They ask him questions. He doesn’t remember anything, but there are answers on his mouth. Some he gets right ( _Where is Stalingrad? What kind of gun is this? How far can you run without stopping?)_ and some he can’t answer ( _What is your name? Where were you born?)_ They give him the answers, they give him pain, so he doesn’t forget. It’s Drakov. Dasha to his friends. The name won’t stick in his head, won’t stay. It makes him sad to think it. His own name. He can’t remember his own name. They put him back in the tank.

 

Доброкачественный

He wakes up (he never stops waking up.)

He is dangerous. They are scared of him. He must bow his head, must avert his eyes. Доброкачественный. Their fear will feed his fear. (And he is always afraid, because everything begins and ends with the nothingness.) He is dangerous, he must not forget that. They are right to be afraid of him. Доброкачественный. He most show that he is not dangerous to them. Доброкачественный. He is dangerous. He must hold himself back for them.

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. They teach him strategies. They show him battle plans. They show him how to work with a team, how to think tactically. The teacher is blonde. His face is round. _His face is narrow._ His face is round. He wears black. _He wears red-white-blue._ He wears black. “Soldat, why are you crying?” He doesn’t know. They put him back in the tank.

 

Возвращение на родину

He wakes up to faces that he does not know.

This is his team. The people here, the people around him when this word is said. Возвращение на родину.Like a newborn chick, he imprints on them. Возвращение на родину.They will give him orders, intel, they will give him what he needs to complete the mission. They are his team. Возвращение на родину.

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. There is an upgrade to the Arm. They open plates, they install it, deep in the shoulder where it aches. They close up the plates, reboot the arm. There are words. _Sputnik,_  they say, and something in the Arm goes _click,_ too deep inside to hurt, but it feels _wrong._  He drops, slack, to the floor. He cannot move for an hour. They put him back in the tank.

 

Один

He wakes up.

This is his only purpose. Один.He is a protector. Один.Russia has suffered -- he sees the dead at Stalingrad, the starving, the winter. (The winter brings a rattle into a skinny chest, he must protect -- he is a protector--) Один.This is what the West lost: a few million, perhaps. This is what we lost: Twenty million, at least. There are so many dead we cannot count them all. Один.We need a protector. Один.The winter protects Russia, and always has. Always will. Один.He is the Winter Soldier, come through the ice to protect the people. Один,один,один.

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. They take him into town. He is with his handler. They buy fruit. He is not restrained. There are no guards to shoot him. He does not run. They return to base. He doesn’t get to eat the fruit. They put him back in the tank.

 

Грузовой вагон

He wakes.

He has no memories, no self, he is no one, a blank slate. There is no terror in that, now. The blankness. The darkness. Грузовой вагон. He is no one, has no self except what they have given him. The part of himself that screams is locked away now. He does not need it to do what must be done.  Грузовой вагон _._ The part of him that thinks _I don’t want this, this isn’t me._ It is a distraction, from the more important things. It screams in his head, but the screams are far away, a distant shriek, like metal on metal, a train trying to stop. He doesn’t need a self. He has sent it away. Грузовой вагон _._

They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. There are protocols to be learned. **OPERATION PROTOCOL: COMPLETE MISSION PARAMETERS. OPERATION PROTOCOL: LEAVE NO WITNESSES. OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO BASE WITHIN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS.** They blare in his skull, echoing around in the empty space, sinking into his subconscious. They put him back in the tank.

 

He wakes up. They send him into town. He buys fruit. He is not restrained. He is not guarded. The handler is not there but. He has orders. He buys the fruit, and later, he waits behind the store. When the store owner comes out, he smacks his palm hard against the man’s temple. _Crack_ , and his heart stops. He arranges the body, makes it look like the man fell and cracked his head on the floor, not on the Soldier's metal palm. He eats the fruit he bought before he returns to base. They did not say he could. They did not say he couldn’t. The fruit is crisp and sweet on his tongue. Better than the sustenance they usually give him. He likes it. He likes eating the fruit more than he liked killing the seller. He disposes of remaining evidence and returns to the base. _Test successful,_ they say. _Ready for deployment,_ they say. They put him back in the tank.

 

“Доброе утро, Солдат.”

“Я готов отвечать,” he says.

“У нас есть для тебя миссия,” the handler says. _We have a mission for you._ He closes the book -- red, with a black star. He sets it aside. Picks up a folder. The Soldier does not look at the handler when he takes the folder. He must be compliant. There are rules about when he can and cannot make eye contact. He does not remember, but he knows. There are rules. His gaze skitters aside. There is a tech making notes at his desk. There is a calendar on the tech's desk.

It is 1964.

 

* * *

 

 

This is mission protocol:

He wakes up, shivering. Bright lights. Heat lamps. The techs take his vitals. He cannot stand without assistance. Hands will move him, if he needs to be moved. He cannot control the shaking. He cannot remember who he is.

The handler comes in, with the book. Red book, black star. He says the words. Parts of his mind slot into place, sometimes painfully, like a knife between ribs. He usually screams. But then: calm.

“Доброе утро, Солдат.”

“Я готов отвечать,” he says.

After that, it is like being a train on the tracks. There is a comfort in it: the regularity of routine. He doesn’t have to think about it, which is good, because his mind is an aching gap, like the place where his left arm was. But, he knows what will happen next, even if he does not remember. He is a train on the tracks, and he must not deviate. There are fearful voids to either side of these narrow rails. If he wanders, he will fall.

They give him the briefing, and sustenance: a bottle, with a straw. Something thick, and foul-tasting. He reads the file, and sucks on the straw. Gross.

There are men standing by, rifles at the ready. There are always men standing by, with guns. In case. They will shoot him, if he makes them. He thinks about it, sometimes.

He finishes the file. They take it away. He never needs to read it more than once. They give him what he needs to complete the mission. He gears up, checks his guns, stretches the last of the ice from his muscles.

Then: transport to mission site.

 

After: he returns to the base.

First, he returns equipment, surrenders his weapons. They apply first aid, if he needs it. Mostly, they just let him bleed. It always stops eventually.

Then there is the debrief: report on mission success, while someone takes notes. His body does not know what mission failure feels like. He supposes that he has never failed. There is a wholesome kind of comfort in that too. He will take whatever comfort he can get, given the circumstances.

Then, they give him more sustenance. Another nutrient slurry to drink while the techs work on the Arm. Repairs. Maintenance. Upgrades. This is a time for quiet. He needs only to sit still. He can think what he likes, as long as he doesn’t let it show.

The Fist of Hydra knows more than he remembers. The Soldier hears more than they think, and understands more than they realize, and knows better than to mention that to anyone.

These are some of the things that he knows, without remembering:

 

One:

He knows the handler. The handler is always there. The handler’s name is always Lukin. Lukin used to be younger. The Soldier was never younger than he is now. The Soldier will never be older than he is now.

He is an unnatural thing, suspended between this world and the next. Not alive, but not dead either. He’s like a ferryman; always moving from one shore to the other, moving people from one world to the next, but never allowed to set foot in either one. Suspended in time. Ageless. Deathless.

Nice words for a shitty situation. But the upshot is this: someday, the Soldier will be alive, and the handler will be dead. The Soldier is looking forward to that day.

 

Two:

He knows that he has seventy-two hours of functionality before he must return for maintenance. They have drilled this into him: **return to base within seventy-two hours.** As soon as he wakes up, there is a countdown clock in his head. He has seventy two hours. He must follow orders and complete the mission within this window. Seventy. Two. Hours.

That is how long he has to fake it. That is how long he must maintain the facade of obedience, of subservience. That’s how long he has to ignore the static in his head, the pain in his body. That’s how long he has to pretend that he isn’t fucking terrified all the goddamn time. Seventy-two hours, and then they will let him sleep again. Once he’s back in the tank, the screaming will stop.

 

Three:

The Arm is his. It is always his. It has always been his. It is the only thing that they do not take away. He loves the Arm. It is tough, and it protects him, the way he protects Mother Russia. The way Hydra protects all of them, from themselves.

The Arm can do many impressive things, just like he can. But his favorite thing that the Arm does is when it is sitting quiet, and little calibration loops shiver up and down from shoulder to fingertips and back again. The loops make a purring sound. Like a cat, or a car engine.

Also, the calibration loops help with the pain. It’s something to do with how the Arm talks to his nerves, how his nerves talk back.

“It’s like it’s not designed for this,” a tech complains, once, as he’s struggling to calibrate the sensors. “Like it was never supposed to interface with human nerves.”

“Good thing he’s not human,” another tech retorts.

 _Haaaaaaa,_ thinks the Soldier’s rusty brain.

He likes the Arm, but his body is constantly trying to get rid of it. That’s why he has scars where the Arm meets his shoulder, but he doesn’t have scars in the places his body knows he should. He knows, for example, that there should be surgical scars all across his torso, all across his back, up and down his spine. His body remembers them, but the skin is smooth. Smooth everywhere except where it’s trying to escape from the Arm. He wishes that his body would stop. He _needs_ that Arm.

 

When maintenance is done, repairs have been made, upgrades are complete, they put him back in the tank, where it is quiet, and there is no thinking to be done. He thinks that being in the tank must be like death. He’ll take what he can get.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up, shivering. Bright lights. Heat lamps. The techs take his vitals. He cannot stand without assistance. Hands move him from the defrosting table to a chair. He is stiff. He cannot control the shaking. He cannot remember who he is.

“This doesn’t seem like a good idea,” says one tech to another, in Russian. “How do we know he won’t…”

 _Won’t what?_ His head aches. He can’t remember.

“It’s a _test,”_ the other tech says. “The point is that we _don’t know,_  and we’re going to find out. Lukin is confident -- you want to tell him you have doubts?”

The first tech swears under his breath and shakes his head.

Then the handler comes in, with the book. Red book, black star. He says the words. Parts of the Soldier’s mind slot into place, sometimes painfully, like a knife between ribs. He screams. But then: calm.

“Доброе утро, Солдат.”

“Я готов отвечать,” he says.

 

It is 1968. His mission is in France. Outside of Bordeaux. Some of the techs around him speak Russian, but mostly they speak French. He knows French without knowing _how_ he knows French. It is familiar in a _cordite pipesmoke red wine_ way. It doesn’t make any sense. _Qui vivra verra,_ says a voice in his head, and laughs, raucous and long. The Soldier does not laugh. Laughing is not for him.

He has a target. They give him a file on the target, with intel, and pictures. The target’s face makes an itch in the back of the Soldier’s head. It is not quite an echo. It is like an echo of an echo. In a room far away. He does not report it to the techs.

The target is called Dernier. He infiltrated one of their bases, took their secrets. Blew up the compound on his way out. He must be killed, but. It must look like an accident.

They give him a motorcycle, half a dozen knives. Two guns. A rifle. He shouldn’t need any of them, they say. But it is a precaution. He must kill anyone who sees his face. He decides that no one will see his face. Minimal casualties are mission-compliant. Also, they are his preference. Not that he would say as much to anyone.

They give him a helmet. The tech who offers him the helmet is just a kid, and when he accidentally makes eye contact, his face goes sheet white, his eyes wide with recognition. “Mon dieu, vous êtes--” and then he's cut off when one of the Russian guards backhands him.

The Soldier looks away. This is nothing to do with him, he understands. And he understands that if he expresses curiosity about it, the guard will slap him next. And that'll just be the beginning.

He puts on the helmet. It covers his face.

 

It is April, and the target is attending a fancy party, at a fancy house in the country, perched on a hill overlooking a small vineyard. There is food, dancing, drinks and chatter. The Soldier watches from the far side of the vineyard. It looks warm inside the house, its windows aglow with yellow-orange light, spilling out over the stone patio, the pots overflowing with herbs and flowers.

It is cold in the woods. The Soldier dislikes cold. And also woods. There is nothing technically wrong with woods: they make good cover, and shelter one from the rain, but.

The body remembers _cold, mud, pinesap, bark scraping his hands as he settled into the nest he’d made, ready to watch over--_

The Soldier dislikes woods. He imagines a place with more buildings, more noise. More people, but not in a way that makes him cringe inside. In this imaginary place, the people are loud and unfriendly, but he likes it. There are no woods like this, and when it is cold, he can go inside. He would not dislike watching the cold from inside a warm place, he thinks.

He returns to mission focus. He does not dislike waiting and watching. There is wholesome satisfaction in this. He knows that he is trained as a sniper (designated marksman, his brain wants to call it) so it makes sense that he finds satisfaction in this. In waiting, patiently, watching through a scope as the target (Jacques Dernier, French Resistance and Strategic Scientific Reserve) sips glasses of wine and smiles. The body makes an echo of taste on the Soldier’s tongue. Rich and warm, all the way down into his stomach.

The party winds down. People begin to leave, alone and in small groups. The target remains for a long time, but finally, the Soldier sees him look at his watch, go through the motions of saying his goodbyes. He has been drinking, and now he will return home. He will not make it home.

The Soldier is waiting at the end of the drive, hidden in the shadows, fingers curled around the handlebars of his motorcycle, waiting. Listening.

“Jacques, wait,” says a woman's voice. He can hear her, distantly, even though the drive is a hundred meters long, and his hiding place is well back in the trees. They are not keeping their voices down, and his hearing is very good.

“Here, I wanted to give you this myself,” she is saying. Her voice -- she speaks English, but the words sound different from the English that he speaks. “Since you were coming here anyway.”

The Soldier looks over his shoulder, through the trees. It is a long way, but they are standing in the circle of light outside the front door. She has handed something to the target. A piece of paper.

“Ahhhh,” the target says, a heavy sigh. “Peggy, _non,_  I could not--”

The name sets off echoes. _Red lips red dress red nails she is beautiful like guns are beautiful she’s perfect for Steve she’s--_

The Soldier shakes his head hard. The Arm recalibrates, the loud metallic purr is comforting. Blocks out some of the static in his head -- the distant screaming. He has to fake it for forty-eight more hours. Hopefully no longer than that. There is a cryotank waiting for him.

“I know it’s a long flight. But we’re trying to get all the Howlies there. Have a little get together of our own, after. He would’ve been 50 this year, you know.” He can tell by her voice that she is smiling -- a soft, sad little smile. He can picture the smile in his head, although he was not briefed on her. She is not part of his mission. “Say you’ll come. Please.”

“‘ow can I resist,” the target says. They hug, then, under the lights.

“Drive safe,” she says.

_Ha._

The target’s car passes by a moment later. The Soldier waits a moment, then starts his motorcycle. He follows, just out of sight. In 3.5 miles there will be a lonely stretch of sunken road. That is his opportunity.

 

When the car is a smoking wreck, wrapped around a tree, the Soldier brings his motorcycle around to confirm the kill. He kicks out the kickstand and walks to the driver’s side door.

The target is unconscious, but still breathing. The Soldier sighs, feeling put upon. He tears the door off, slams the man’s face with his metal fist. Twice. The man’s heart stops beating.

The Soldier is turning away, when something catches his eye.

The body freezes. Malfunction. What caused it?

He turns back.

There is a piece of paper on the ground near the car. It must have fallen out during the wreck, maybe when he yanked the door off its hinges. It is the paper that Carter (Carter?) gave to the target before he left. The Soldier’s head twitches, ticcing hard to one side, sharp, like a dog that listens.

He steps closer, jerky. His body wants to see that paper. He caught a glimpse of a shape. There is something on it. Something important. He stares down at it, hands clenched hard at his sides.  He crouches down, and picks up the paper.

There is a picture.

It is stylized, like a print, like a drawing, but he knows this silhouette. It is a man, walking away. He has a shield on his back, round, with stripes -- red, white, red, blue, star -- a target, a _goddamn_ target, he _wears a goddamn target on his back swear to Christ--_

The man is walking away in the picture. He does not turn his head to look back. His hair, in the picture, is golden. Darker there, at the nape of his neck, and like flax on top. His helmet dangles from one hand _because he never wears the fucking thing unless you force it on his thick fucking skull--_

The Soldier flinches, and glares at the picture, wishing it wasn’t a picture. He wants to see this man’s face, he _needs_ to see--

He blinks, and reads the words. At the top:

MEMORIAL DAY SERVICE  
1968

And underneath:

_Steven Grant Rogers, Captain America, gave his life for his country. On May 30, we honor his sacrifice and reflect on his legacy._

The Soldier fucking _reels._

Memorial Day. _Memorial._ It hits him like a goddamn shotgun blast to the gut. _Gave his life._

He doesn’t know what this is, or why it feels this way. But his body knows. His body feels it. Sick, lurching, agony.  He drops the paper. He staggers back. He knocks over his own motorcycle. He stumbles to the side of the road. He vomits into the ditch, bracing himself with the Arm against an ancient, twisted tree. His metal fingers dig into the trunk, making deep gouges. The gears whine.

He is--

_\--he’s burning up, God, his skin is so hot, and his breath rattles in his chest, bubbling and wheezing. He’s got his eyes shut, those long lashes dark against his cheeks and the two little furrows between his brows and he's gotta open his eyes, just to see those baby blues. Steve has to get through this, he has to, he--_

He is--

_\--tearing the dumb fucking helmet off. “Steve! Steve! Come on, pal, stay with me.” He’s watching Steve’s eyes flicker, unfocused, lashes drifting down.  All he can think is that if Steve’s eyes close now -- while Morita is hastily stitching up that bullet hole -- then he’ll never open his eyes again. So he hauls off and slaps Steve hard on the cheek. Steve’s eyes open, wide but unfocused. “You don’t get to die on me, asshole! Not on my fucking watch, do you hear me?” --_

There are tears on his face. There is pain in his chest, like the ice is inside him, crawling out towards his skin with sharp frigid claws. He is shaking. His head throbs, pulses with pain. There is a scream in his skull. It is getting louder.

_\-- “Qui vivra verra!” Frenchie says, and throws back his head, and laughs._

_“The hell does that mean?” he asks, looking to Gabe._

_Gabe is grimacing, but it’s hiding a laugh. “He who lives shall see,” he translates._

_He looks from Gabe, to the dead Hydra agent, froth on his lips, both fists raised in that awful fucking salute._ Cut off one head, two more shall take its place, _and Frenchie had said..._

_He looks to Frenchie in disgust, only to find Steve clapping Dernier on the back, and now they’re both laughing, howling with it, wiping tears from the corners of their eyes. “No!” he says, putting his foot down. “Steve, don’t you fuckin encourage him, that ain’t even funny!”_

_Steve’s eyes are sparkling with it, the laughter. “Two more shall take its place,” he wheezes. “I guess we’ll see, right?”_

_“Qui vivra verra!” Dernier says--_

Dernier said. And _now--_

It comes out of his mouth. The scream in his head. It echoes through the woods. High, agonized keening. Inhuman. An animal sound of pain, almost like the screeching of metal on metal.

It does not stop until his throat is raw.

 

He returns to base.

The base is a warehouse by the docks. He pulls up outside the gates and waits, patiently. The guards approach, wary, guns raised. He stops the motorcycle, steps away. They escort him inside.

His meat hand is shaking. His Arm purrs, up and down, calibration loops. It doesn’t help as much as it usually does.

He surrenders his weapons, placing them on the table. He makes his report. It takes two tries to find Russian. The guards are nervous, guns raised and pointed at him. He finishes his report.

He is not supposed to ask for anything. He certainly is not supposed to _beg_. His body knows that he is not supposed to. This is a glitch of some kind. The handler will want to refresh the activation codes, strengthen the programming. That will hurt.

He doesn’t care. “Please,” in his rusty voice. English in his mouth, flat and strange and not at all like English as spoken by the woman in the red dress. “Please. The tank. Please.” The mission is done. He just wants to sleep.

The handler makes a displeased sound and backhands him, fast and stinging, just the once. He turns away from the Soldier, ignoring him the way someone might ignore a whining animal. “Well. At least we can call it a partial success. Discipline him before you put him back.”

Despair. Discipline will take hours. He has only delayed his return to the tank. Not even begging makes a difference.

The only thought that gets him through the next few hours is the oblivion of the tank, waiting for him at the end of the day. He hopes that he does not wake.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up. He doesn’t know who he is, where he is. There is an ache in his chest, but he doesn’t know what it is. He feels hollow. His body is remembering something that his mind has forgotten.

Loss, he thinks. This is loss.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Pegasuschick for letting me ramble to her about this Literally All The Time. I'm sorry I dragged you into Buckrogers Hell. (I'm not sorry, and you shouldn't feel sorry either she's a terrible enabler.)
> 
> If you want to know how (some) of the Howlies deal with Dernier's death [there’s a B-Side for that.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15845442/chapters/41332208#workskin)


	3. Time to Come Home

## 3

 _I don't need you to worry for me cause I'm alright_  
_I don't want you to tell me it's **time to come home**_  
_I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life_  
_Go ahead with your own life and leave me alone_

_-[My Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JFEfdK_Ls) by Billy Joel and Phil Ramone, 1978_

 

1978 is a big year for Hydra, and a busy one for the Soldier.

 

In the spring, he has a double mission in Kabul: one city, two kills.

First, there is an internal execution: an operative who has failed in their duty and is to be taken out. The Soldier is given a sniper rifle for this mission, and shown aerial surveillance of the operative’s safe house. He gets to pick his own spot; a place with good cover and a clear shot through the window. He _chooses_ the spot. They take him there in a van. He climbs, gets into position, sets up his rifle and uses the Arm as a bipod. It does not shake or tire. He gets to lie on a rooftop in the hot Kabul sun and wait. All the Soldier has to do now is wait.

 _I like this,_  he thinks, boldly. Liking is not compliant, but there is no one here to see him liking the thing. He is alone. The sun is beating down on his back. Waves of radiating heat thrum through the air. He likes how hot it is -- not like the aching heat of a thaw, or the sharp heat of an overworked Arm, or the searing pain of a burn. This is warmth; steady and soothing, all the way to his bones. He likes it.

He likes the city smells and sounds, too. The clamor of many voices, of engines. The smell of many bodies, of hot concrete, and cooking food. It makes a peaceful place in his brain.

It’s _nice._  He presses his cheek against the rifle and watches through the scope, waiting. Sweat beads on the back of his neck, drips. His skin tingles with how warm it is. Knots in his back unwind. He feels like melting. 

And then the target comes into view. It’s a man, a big guy, and he’s drinking a beer, wandering around in an undershirt. The Soldier read his file. The target used to be a good operative, a useful soldier. He followed orders without question. His kill list was long, and included women and children as often as it included men and soldiers. He had no quibbles about killing for a greater cause. But lately he has become unreliable. Unstable. His kills became too showy. He killed more than he needed to. He drew attention to himself. Hence the safe house. Stupid. Sloppy.

The Soldier has worked with the target before. He does not remember, but it was in the file. The target had been Field Command, in Chile, in ‘73. The report included an official reprimand for excessive force.

The Soldier’s head tics. His meat hand twitches, moves. It slides up under the back of his own shirt. He twists his arm around, presses his palm flat over his spine, just below his shoulder blades. The muscles are hard. The lines of his ribs stand out. The dip of his spine lies under his palm and his middle finger. The skin is smooth. Unscarred. He never scars, except where the Arm meets his shoulder. There are no scars there now, but there were…

He frowns. Phantom sensations in his brain: the skin where his hand is lying flat -- burning with pain, split open, bleeding hot-wet. The sound -- a sharp whip-crack. More pain. A throat raw from screaming. He doesn't _remember,_ not really. But he knows. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. Excessive force.

He doesn’t know what he could have done to deserve punishment in Chile. He's never disobedient. He never fails. The mission was successful. 

 _They should have taken him out then,_ the Soldier thinks, looking at the target, and knowing that it's true. They knew, then, that this man was unstable, an unreliable operative. But they kept putting him out in the field anyway. Stupid.  _Sloppy._

The Soldier pulls his meat hand sharply from under his shirt and presses his cheek back against the rifle. He shifts his hips, settling into his prone position. He adjusts the angle of his rifle and tweaks the scope. The target is in his sights. He comes into focus. It won’t be a difficult shot. He narrows his attention on the target’s face, the space between his mean, piggy eyes.

 _He’s a bully,_  the Soldier thinks, out of nowhere. _He’s a bully and he needs to be stopped._ It doesn’t quite sound like his own voice. It’s deep, and it rings with certainty in the Soldier's empty head. His voice never rings with anything. But he’s sure of this. The voice in his head is right.

When the Soldier pulls the trigger, he feels…

Satisfaction. More than at a job well done. He enjoyed this kill. More than just being good at it, pleasing the Handler, accomplishing the mission parameters… that man _deserved_ to die. The Soldier doesn’t know how he knows that. He’s never thought much about what people _deserve._

It’s an interesting question, but he won't bring it up to Field Command or the Handler. He has another target to take out, another mission parameter to fulfill.

 

The second target is a teacher, a writer, a troublesome intellectual. He is also a civilian. The soldier kills the target outside his home and walks away without being apprehended. He makes his winding way back towards base. It will take him time to get there. He must not be followed.

He does not feel the same way about this kill. He did not like this kill, he thinks. He does not know that this intellectual _deserved_ to be killed the way that the Hydra operative had.

He thinks about that: about deserving. He thinks about the note in the operative’s file, and about the phantom feeling of a whip across his back.

 _What do I deserve?_ He thinks, out of nowhere.

He has killed people. Perhaps one day someone will shoot him through the window of a safe house, and that will be what he deserves. He wouldn’t mind that, he doesn’t think. Seems only fair. Though he makes a note never to be so careless. Just because it’s fair doesn’t mean he has to make it _easy._

But it bothers him. He shoves his hands in his pockets and keeps walking. Distantly, he can hear the sirens. They’ve found his latest victim. They won’t find him.

But if they did find him, and somehow managed to take him in (unlikely in the extreme) they would punish him without ever thinking to punish his handlers. And that strikes him as… inefficient. Stopping him wouldn't stop the problem. The Handler would just find someone else to take his place. It wouldn't stop their work. Someone would have to tell the police about the Handler, and Field Command, and the mobile base, and the techs. The Tank. Someone would have to talk.

The police won’t find him, but if they did, and if they had some magical way to take him in, he would talk, he decide. He would tell them about the mobile base, about the Handler, about the techs.

It’s a fantasy, though. The police won’t catch him, and if they did, he would kill himself before he let anyone take him. It’s in his programming.

 

He is back to the mobile base by morning.

He has had a lot of time to think about who deserves what. He has had a lot of time to think. His head aches from it. His chest aches. His meat hand shakes. It makes the guards nervous.

He makes his report. He strips his shirt off and sits for maintenance. The techs open his arm, and start working on tuning it up, making it ready for the tank.

He stares ahead. He thinks about what they deserve, about what he deserves. He thinks about choices. He can’t remember choosing this. They say he did, but he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember choosing it, and it occurs to him that if they offered him the choice again. If he had known then what he knows now, he would say no. He would say it emphatically. He would say... _Fuck no._ He would say _Fuck you._

The tech goes flying. The guards raise their weapons. He bares his teeth.

“Держи огонь!” says the Handler. That old man. _Lukin_. The Soldier  _hates_ Lukin, as much as he liked lying out in the sunlight. He hates that smile, that face that-- 

And then. “Soldat! Sputnik!”

 _Click_ goes something in his arm. Deep inside him, where it connects to his spine. He drops. He drools onto the floor while they haul him back up. He is conscious, but unable to move. They complete maintenance on him.

They put him back in the tank. The last thing he sees clearly is the calendar on the desk of one of the techs. It is 18 April 1978.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up. The Handler says the words. There are other words in his head. _Another day, another fuckin’ dollar,_  someone says. He shakes his head like a dog. He is still shivering, but he feels strange. Like… maybe he didn’t get all the way frozen this time. Like. Maybe he’s still a little raw. He feels raw. The echo of something, some emotion that makes his chest tight and his hand shake with more than cold. The Arm purrs through calibration loops, like it does when he’s furious.

Strange.

He doesn’t tell the Handler.

“Доброе утро, Солдат.”

“Я готов отвечать,” he says.

 

It is 1 May 1978. The mobile base is in a shipping container. The field commander is Ilya Zelenko. The handler, Lukin, does not go into the field. Lukin will stay with the shipping container. The shipping container is in a warehouse. The warehouse is in New York City. His mission is in New York City.

“The American Branch has a job for you,” they tell him. They sound bored, a little irritated. “And they won’t give us any new toys until you complete it.”

Toys?

The handler laughs at that, nastily. The Soldier wonders what the toys are. He does not ask.

He has work to do. In New York.

It is a good city. The maps are easy on the eyes. Which is a strange way to put it, but that’s how his body wants to say it. New York, she’s easy on the eyes. Legs that go… all the way down to the ground? That doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t tell his handlers.

He has a mission. He has seventy two hours to complete it.  The target is a deserter. The deserter must be eliminated.

But the deserter knows their protocols. The deserter knows who is being sent after him. The Soldier has a long chase ahead of him.

 

“Long” is a relative term, of course. Any other operative -- any _human_ operative -- this chase would take days. Weeks, maybe. But the Soldier is not entirely human. He knows that the standard length of his missions is just over ten hours. He knows that the faster he can finish a mission, the faster he can go back in the tank. He is very tired. The tank is not quite like sleeping, but it is close. It is as close as he can get. He prefers being in the tank.

So; generally, he finishes his missions within ten hours, returns to base, returns to the tank.

This mission, though.

This mission sucks. It drags on, and on, and on. The deserter is wily, and knows their protocols, and knows who is coming for him. He is good at hiding.

It takes over sixty hours. The Soldier has to wear civilian clothes, has to blend in. He’s been given supplies of a non-lethal kind: cash and tokens for the subway and changes of clothes in a backpack. He eats at diners when it becomes necessary, and rents a motel room with cash to use as a base of operations.

He takes catnaps there: a few hours each night, to maintain functionality. His brain makes pictures when he does: pictures of New York, but as seen through a funhouse mirror. The buildings are not so high. The cars are different shapes. The people wear different clothes. There is an empty space under his arm. Something belongs there, at his side, but he is alone.

He prefers the tank to sleeping, he decides. When he’s in the tank, there are no confusing head-pictures. He cannot wait for this mission to be done.

Finally, the Soldier catches up to the target in the back alley of his safehouse and lures him outside long enough to shove a knife into his spine. The Soldier does not generally enjoy the kill. He knows this without knowing why. But today, he’s irritated enough to feel some enjoyment when the bastard makes a strangled gurgling sound and dies.

“You’re a real sonuvabitch,” the Soldier says, without entirely knowing why. “Making me come all the way into midtown like this, Jesus. Fuckin’ asshole.”

The body crumples. The Soldier cleans his knife. “God damn,” he grumbles, before hauling the body onto his shoulder. The sun is already coming up, and he needs to get rid of this without being seen, so he can get back to base, back to the tank.

 

He is coming back, having disposed of the body. He has changed clothes again, disposing of the bloodstained items and acquiring new ones. He is distracted. He is close to the deadline, and there are protocols --

**OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO BASE WITHIN SEVENTY TWO HOURS.**

\--that must be obeyed. He’s walking fast, head down, making for the docks, for the warehouse when.

A voice.

A woman’s voice.

“--Yeah, I need that like I need a _lokh in kop,"_  she is saying, laughing. “Goddamn.”

A hole in the head, he knows. That’s what it means. A hole in the head.

His head snaps around. His body knows those words, but more than that -- his body _knows that voice._ There are three women on the other side of the street. His body feels like the world is tilting sideways, pushing him towards them. He has to stop, to melt back into the shadows. He has to stop himself from crossing the street to… what? His head is spinning. The smells of Brooklyn are thick in his nose and he can taste -- he can taste -- challa bread? What is that?

There are three women. One is old, approximately 60 years. She is smiling, laughing. “Watch your fucking mouth,” his mother says.

No.

She is not.

He does not have...

There is another woman, she is younger, with dark curls and a smile that curves up at the corners. She is small, skinny, looks a little sick, maybe.  She is the one who spoke first, the one who “needs that like a _lokh in kop,”_ and now she is -- laughing. She is his sister, but not, that’s wrong. Because he has no sister, and his sister wore a dress with little flowers all over it. His sister isn’t as old as this woman is. His sister never wore jeans. Because he has no sister.

He remembers: he had a mother, a father, a sister. In Stalingrad Oblast. The Germans killed them? He doesn’t remember it. They have no names to him. No faces. And more than that, he cannot recall the shape of the house, the small things that made it real. None of that feels real to him.

There is a girl with the two women. The younger woman is holding her, balanced on her hip, carrying her. The girl is two, maybe three years old. She is giggling. Her dark hair is in two braids and she is -- she is BeccaSusanJeanie-- she is --

The mother-father-sister in Stalingrad Oblast is like an umbrella in a hurricane. His head is the hurricane. There is a storm of pictures and echoes. There is a deep voice singing _they can’t take that away from me,_ so soft he can barely hear it. There is a sound, the clap of hands together, flour in the air. The smell of baking bread. The smell of trash in the alley. The smell of the hot metal out on the fire escape. 

He ducks down the alley and braces himself against the wall. He throws up.

His head hurts.

He is malfunctioning. He needs to return to base.

**OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO BASE WITHIN SEVENTY TWO HOURS.**

It has been nearly sixty-eight hours.

The base is at the docks, but as he makes his way to it, he veers off course without meaning to. He is stumbling like a drunk, like he had too many fuckin’ drinks, and Stevie ain’t there to--

He shakes his head hard, like a dog. He needs to return to base. He needs maintenance.

 _\--need that like I need a_ lokh in kop--

He turns, towards a building. It has a sign. Condemned, it says. He ignores the sign. He could break the lock, but his body knows another way in. He goes around, down the alley. He pulls himself onto the fire escape easily. His body knows this. He climbs up three flights of stairs. They are rickety. The whole building is rickety. He forces the window open.

**OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO--**

He steps through the window and the protocol goes quiet. Satisfied. This is an old base, he knows. It is very old. But he knows it. So it must be a base. There are no handlers here right now, but they will be here soon, he knows. It has been almost seventy two hours. He needs maintenance.

 _\--like I need a_ lokh--

He needs--

_\--the music is still in his ribcage the next morning, while he’s pouring coffee for himself. “In the mist of a memory... you wander back to me... breathing my name with a sigh...” Steve sighs in a put upon way, audible from the next room, and it makes him grin and grin and--_

The base is small, and bare. Not as small as the mobile base, the shipping container in the warehouse, but still small. It is a two-room apartment. This room has the kitchen. The other room will have a bed in it. His body remembers. There is no tank here. But it is a base.

_\--“Dear god, you really live like this?” Becca is laughing at him, wrinkling up her nose. “You poor bastards.”_

_“We live like kings, thank you very fucking much,” he says, laughing--_

There is a moldering sofa by the window. He sinks onto it. His head hurts. It is filling up with things. He’s worried that it will explode, that his head will pop like a balloon, like a target in his sights after he pulls the trigger--

 _\--“We may never never meet again, on that bumpy road to love_ _  
_ _Still I'll always, always keep the memory of-- _”__

There is music, rhythm. His body remembers it. His body wants to move to it. His body also wants to curl up into a ball and sob. He is cold. Time has passed, and the night air is cold, coming in through the window.

_\--“Wanna share?” he asks, again, because he can’t not. It’s cold, he tells himself. It’s for Steve, he tells himself. He went dancing earlier, and Dot had dragged his hand up her skirt later, when they were necking behind the club. He likes girls. So he can have this. Not that it’s for him. It’s for Steve’s sake, and to save on the heating. He’s not a queer, he’s just frugal._

_“Okay,” Steve says, in that voice that’s too big for his little body. It’s from how much he coughs, all the time, but it just seems impossible, sometimes, how deep Stevie’s voice is, given how small--_

“Soldat?”

He lifts his head out of his hands. It aches. He is malfunctioning. There are two men -- Karpov, who’s just a fuckin’ kid, and Zelenko, who is field command. Not a handler, but close. They are his team.

_\--his team: these fucking assholes. Dugan with his stupid hat. Dernier’s machine-gun French and cordite cologne. Morita’s razor-sharp wit, his quick fucking retorts. Monty’s calm in the face of everything. Gabe’s big smile, his steady hands. And the big palooka himself, the biggest asshole of them all, Ste--_

Where have they been? He’s been here for goddamn hours. His head is filled to bursting with things that don’t make any fucking sense. He needs some goddamn maintenance.

“Soldat, what are you doing here?” asks Zelenko.

“Fuck if I know,” he says.

They reel back, guns snapping up to point at him. He carefully relaxes his shoulders down, averts his gaze. His hands rest, palms up, in his lap. He is compliant. He is.

“Why is he talking like that,” Karpov says. He really is just a kid. But his dad, or his granddad, maybe, is some bigwig in the organization.

The Soldier goes very still. There are two guns pointed at him, and they won’t hesitate to put him down if he isn’t compliant.

Zelenko narrows his eyes. “He’s been out of cryo too long. We need to get him back.”

Karpov doesn’t take his eyes off the Soldier. “Can we move him without him killing us? Because I’m not overly excited about that.”

“I ain’t gonna fuckin’ kill you, pal,” he says, because he wants them to know that he’s harmless. They’re his team. He’s perfectly compliant. He’s just malfunctioning a little.

It isn’t the right thing to say. They both take steps back. Karpov’s finger slides off the guard and onto the trigger. Zelenko’s was already there; not squeezing, but ready to. If he makes a move now, he’ll take two bullets to the head before he can get far.

“Okay,” Karpov says slowly. “That’s… terrifying.”

“Shut up,” Zelenko says. “Soldat, why did you come here?”

“Protocol says return to base, so I returned to base. Whaddya want from me?” He doesn’t move an inch. He doesn’t make eye contact. He doesn’t raise his voice.

“Oh God. It must be some kind of glitch.” Zelenko lowers his gun and runs a hand through his hair. “They didn’t keep him in cryo long enough, maybe. This is why we need that thing the Americans have been working on.” He sighs. “Soldat.”

“Ready to fuckin’ comply, buddy.”

“Great,” Zelenko says, sounding very tired. “Did you complete your mission?”

“Hell yeah I did. He’s swimmin’ with the fishes, just like ya asked.”

Karpov snorts loudly. “Oh my god.” Is he. Laughing?

“Good work, Soldat. You need maintenance. Are you ready for maintenance?”

“Why do you think I’m sittin’ here, asshole?” he snaps. “My head is killin’ me.”

They both have their guns up again.

“Easy, Soldat,” says Zelenko. The Soldier eases the tension in his shoulders. His Arm purrs soothingly at him. Calibration loops up and down. It doesn’t help the pain in his head, doesn’t stop the phantom images and sounds and smells crowding his brain. But he appreciates the effort.

“Do you think we should…” Karpov glances at Zelenko, and raises a brow.

“Yeah, just to be safe,” Zelenko says. “Hey. Soldat.”

“Yeah, pal?”

“Sputnik.”

 _Click,_  deep in the arm. A sound comes out of him, kind of like “Gnuuuughhhuh.” He goes slack, and slips off the couch to sprawl on the floor, completely limp, a puppet with all his strings cut.

“Get the rest of the team,” Zelenko says. “He’ll be down for at least an hour, but we can get him back to the docks, back in the tank.”

 _Thank fucking Christ,_ he thinks, as he drools into the carpet.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up.

It is 22 December 1978. He has a mission. Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He kills a British man who is a lecturer there. The mission goes well. It only takes thirty-six hours, all told. He is... relieved. He doesn’t remember why, exactly. There is a protocol, that he must return to base within seventy-two hours. He doesn’t remember, but his body knows that something fucking awful will happen if he doesn’t.

 

When he gets back to the base, there is a new piece of equipment.

“The Americans have given you a new toy,” says the Handler, in Russian. The Handler's name is Lukin. (Someday the Soldier will be alive and the handler will be dead. The Soldier is looking forward to that day.)

The Soldier turns his attention to the new toy.

It is a chair.

 

* * *

 

This is mission protocol:

He wakes up, shivering. Either in the glass tube in Home Base in Siberia, or in the metal tube of the tank. They take him out. Bright lights. Heat lamps. The techs take his vitals. He cannot stand without assistance. Hands will move him, if he needs to be moved. He cannot control the shaking. He cannot remember who he is.

They take him from the cryo room. They go past the place where the chair is. His whole body flinches away from it. His body remembers the chair like it is a gun, a gun pointed at him. A gun that has shot him in the past, and will do so again.

But it isn’t time for the chair yet. They make him sit. They strap him down. They stand guard, with their guns ready and pointed at him.

The handler comes in, with the book. Red book, black star. He says the words. Parts of his mind slot into place, sometimes painfully, like a knife between ribs. He doesn’t scream, but only because his body remembers this, and remembers that this is not the worst pain he will know. The words continue, and his brain remembers what he is. And then: calm.

“Доброе утро, Солдат.”

“Я готов отвечать,” he says.

They uncuff him. He is usually a bit surprised to remember that he is cuffed. He wonders if maybe they didn’t used to cuff him when the handler read the words. He wonders why they do now. He thinks maybe he is changing, over time. Becoming more dangerous, maybe.

The handler gives him the briefing, and sustenance: a bottle, with a straw. Something thick, and foul-tasting, and laced with stimulants. He reads the file, consumes the sustenance.

There are men standing by, rifles at the ready. There are always men with guns. In case. They will shoot him, if he makes them. He thinks about making them. He thinks about it all the time.

He finishes reading the mission briefing. They take it away. He never needs to read it more than once. They give him what he needs to complete the mission. He gears up, checks his guns, stretches the last of the ice from his muscles.

Then: transport to mission site.

 

If the mission takes too long, he will have to return to base for mid-mission maintenance. They will take him to the chair. He tries to make sure that the mission won’t take too long. He tries to complete the mission within seventy-two hours, as the protocol dictates.

 

After: he returns to the base.

First, he returns equipment, surrenders his weapons. They apply first aid, if he needs it. Mostly, they just let him bleed. It always stops eventually.

Then there is the debrief: report on mission success, while someone takes down the report.

Then, they give him more sustenance. Another nutrient slurry to drink while the techs work on the Arm. Repairs. Maintenance. Upgrades.

Then: the chair. He sits. Sometimes they need to strap him down. He loses control of his breathing, stops being able to control his expression. Compliance and acceptance is impossible. Every part of him wants to flinch away. He can barely register the guards around him, their guns leveled at him. The Arm starts to run calibration loops, over and over and over and--

The halo comes down.

The paddles press to his face, close around his head.

Then: pain. It takes everything away. He screams.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole sequence is lightly inspired by the comics, where the Winter Soldier goes rogue and runs away to NYC. In the comics, he's gone for like two weeks, but obviously here he's just a few hours late returning to base, but WHATEVER.
> 
> Special thanks to the Gal Pal for betaing and general emotional support.
> 
> Thanks to all who read and kudos and comment, you guys are Excellent, truly.


	4. Ой, а жизнь пошла хреново

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there is art (ART!!!) by [@chikinan](http://chikinan.tumblr.com/) for this chapter. it is cute (SO CUTE!!!!!) and embedded in the chapter and there's a link if you want to go reblog the original post and support the artist (YOU SHOULD!!!!!)

## 4

_Ой, огурчики солёны,_  
**_Ой, а жизнь пошла хреново_ **  
_Ой, налей-ка миленький,_  
_Накатим по второй!_

_-[Старый барин](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtIyHRVKEo4) by Любэ, 1991._

 

He wakes up still smelling like a sewer for some reason. It is 25 December, 1989. His handler says the words. His handler stands in front of him. A young man. About his age, and smirking. He closes the book.

“Доброе утро, Солдат.”

“Я готов отвечать,” he says.

The handler orders him to execute a man. The man is older, mid to late sixties, if the soldier is any judge.

Haaaaaaa, he thinks. It’s funny because what the fuck would he know about getting older? He is a deathless thing. The world is passing him by without leaving a mark on him. His brain knows: The Soldier was never younger than he is now. The Soldier will never be older than he is now. That means something, but he can’t put his finger on it...

Anyway, he needs to focus: he has a mission, of sorts. The old man failed his duty, the handler tells him. (He knows the handler. The handler is always there.) He was a bad leader, and he couldn't stop the wall coming down, and other things. It's time for a change, so the old man must die. The Soldier must kill him. The handler -- the handler’s name is Karpov (The handler’s name is Lukin) the handler’s name is _Karpov._  The handler says he can use the Arm. If he wants.

(Lukin used to be younger. The Soldier was never younger than he is now. The Soldier will never be older than he is now. Someday, the Soldier will be alive, and the handler (Lukin? The handler.) will be dead. The Soldier is looking forward to that day.)

He wants.

The old man is gagged, but trying to shout something through the gag. “Fffput-nik, _fputnik."_  Nothing happens.

“До свидания, товарищ Лукин,” says the handler.

_Goodbye, Comrade Lukin,_ the Soldier’s brain translates, and his body feels giddy.

He does not always enjoy the kill. He does not remember his kills, but his body knows that he does not always enjoy them.

He enjoys this kill. The arm pulls back, and then batters nearly through Lukin’s face in one blow. He hits Lukin two more times, until the skull crunches through into the soft tissue within. It’s appropriate. He has his fingers in Lukin’s brains, and that feels good, to his body. The old man goes limp and stinks of death -- blood and shit. And something in the Soldier’s body relaxes. He feels _amazing_. Relief, and satisfaction. The body feels victorious without the mind being aware of why, precisely.

The handler -- Karpov -- is staring at him, eyes narrowed, calculating.

His meat hand is shaking, he notices. There has been a rush of endorphins, adrenaline. His body making him high. His face might be expressing some of the satisfaction his body feels and that is… non-compliant. He ducks his head, and the curtain of his hair hides him. Non-compliance is not acceptable.

He’s breathing hard, though, and his hair won’t hide that.

A hand falls on his shoulder and he twitches away, but the hand stays, squeezes. It doesn’t hurt yet, but he cannot recall ever being touched without violence. The touch is warm and firm it makes a smell come up in the back of his throat, in his mind _\-- pine needles and sap, cordite, and Steve saying “you did good, Bu--”_

“Merry Christmas, Soldat,” the handler says, quietly. In English. He doesn’t know why, but it strikes something in him.

The Soldier looks up. This handler. Karpov. He would die for this handler. He doesn’t know why, but he knows that he would. He feels that there is a debt owed, from him to his handler. The balance is uneven. He is indebted to this man. He knows it, without knowing why.

The hand falls away, and the Soldier makes no sound, but his body wants to whimper at the loss of contact. It was warm.

 

Karpov has another mission for him, once he has cleaned Lukin’s blood out of his arm. But first; Karpov takes him around the facility. He knows the layout of this base. It is Home Base. (He hears a loud crack, a rising cheer, and there is a  meat smell in his nose. Hot dogs. He doesn’t know why.) The base is large. A missile silo, once upon a time, or perhaps simply made to look like one. There are no missiles. Outside there is snow.

This is his home, Karpov tells him. He was made here, years ago. That is why they call it home base. (Crack. Cheer. Hot dogs.) The Soldier wonders how many years he has been here without knowing that it is his home.

Home is a good thing, the Soldier knows. So this must be a good place. Quiet, though. There should be more music. He doesn’t know why he thinks there should be more music, but he thinks there should be more music. He doesn’t say so, though.

Once the tour is done, the Soldier goes to the briefing room automatically, ready to receive orders, to be given his equipment but--

The handler (Karpov, this handler is called Karpov) says _no equipment, no briefing. Come with me._ The Soldier is baffled by the change in procedure, but he knows how to follow orders. Karpov explains to the Soldier while they walk. He is to be a trainer, not a killer. He must share his skills with some recruits. They are going to the training room.

This is…

This has never happened before. He doesn’t remember, really, but the Soldier’s body is sure of it nonetheless.

Then, they come around the corner and Karpov opens the door, walks through, and the Soldier follows. He stops. Stares. The trainees are lined up by the mats, hands clasped behind their backs, heads lifted. It looks like they’ve been standing there, waiting, for a while now. Their grasp of parade rest is perfect, which is pretty remarkable, because these trainees are _tiny._

They are _children,_  in fact. Little girl children. Five of them. Belova, Yelena Olegovna. Veselovskaya, Ekaterina Savvichna. Volkova, Tatiana Ivanovna. Orlova, Anna Anatolyevna. And Romanova, Natalia Alienovna.

He barely hears the speech Karpov gives them, introducing him as some kind of part-monster, part-machine, part legendary hero. They watch him with wide eyes and no expressions on their still-slightly-chubby baby faces.

They are so fucking cute. He _fucking adores_ them.

 

The first day is hand-to-hand, so the Soldier can see what they can do. They’re like, maybe five years old, but they’re tough as fuckin’ nails, every one of them. They’ve been doing gymnastics, and some hand-eye coordination stuff. He’s pretty sure they’re being dosed with something, because they’re way stronger than they should be. But maybe they’ve just been training since birth or whatever.

They are all perfectly obedient, which he finds unnerving. He teaches them how to swing their little bodies around, to gather momentum with what weight they have to deliver the takedown. He shows them all the tender places where their punches will be most effective.

They obey his every order, even the silent ones (he doesn’t speak very much) and watch him warily.

It only takes them twenty-four hours to start pushing the boundaries, taking initiative, taking risks.

On the morning of the second day, he is supposed to teach them how to aim guns that are too big for their small hands. He brings a bag of guns into the practice room. He will show them proper trigger discipline, how to hold and aim and compensate for the kickback. He will do all this, but--

He turns around from where he was setting the bag down and finds one of them, a little ferocious thing with huge green eyes and hair the color of a bright copper penny, and she’s standing _right fucking there,_  too close by half, and with her weight on the balls of her feet. _Threat,_ his brain registers. And this is the problem with relying too heavily on what his body knows, because without thinking, he strikes out. She slips past the blow, just like he taught them yesterday, ready to swing herself up and--

And his metal hand is there, curling around her throat and--

He freezes. The threat is small. Thin face, skinny little shoulders. A slight wheeze on the inhale because of his squeezing fingers. Just a little kid. Natalia, he remembers. Her blue eyes are sharp on him, watching. Green eyes. Not blue. Not scared. He looks around and sees the others are watching too. Tatiana, Ekaterina, Yelena, Anna. They’re watching him, with their eyes wide and unblinking and…

They planned this, he realizes. Probably drew fucking straws to see who would take the risk and sneak up on the new instructor. They’re testing _him_ too. Seeing what his limits are. What they can get away with.

They were watching him yesterday, and now they think they’ve got his number. They think he’s a big brute, no brains, all brawn. He can understand why they think that: his Russian is soft, and stammering, and his accent is pretty bad. Sometimes, if it isn’t phrased as a simple command, his brain stutters over the words and won’t translate.

So they thought: maybe we can outsmart this one. Catch him off-guard. Let’s poke the bear, see how dangerous he really is.

They haven’t made a sound, not even Natalia, save the slight wheeze of his breath. Her breath.

Jesus. Even the armed guards wouldn’t dare try anything like that. Sneaking up on him from behind? When he wasn’t ready for it? These girls are fucking fearless.

The Arm whirrs. He wills it to disengage, fingers unlocking from around her throat. She doesn’t move away from him.

“Don’t be fuckin’ cute with me,” he says to them. It comes out in English, and their eyes widen, but he can tell that they understand. “And don’t try that shit again,” he adds. “Now come on. We’re gonna learn guns today.”

 

They take him to the chair every three days like clockwork. He knows this. They have the girls for a few months, and they need him to train them. They cannot afford to keep him under long enough to let the ice do its work. The girls have much to learn. Also, this is a good time to test the chair’s effectiveness, to see how long he can go between cryofreeze.

The chair is different from the tank. It scrambles the echoes. (Memories. They’re memories. Sometimes he knows that, but most of the time he doesn’t.) It makes them confused and shattered and easier to ignore, but it does not block them. He has overheard the techs talk about this. The ice crystals form scar tissue and lesions as they melt, which prevent him from accessing memories. The chair creates short circuits, fries connections, but it does not create blocks.

They watch him -- the techs, and guards. They watch him with the girls, and they take notes, not just on the progress that the girls make, but also on his state. There are two experiments happening at once, the Soldier understands. One is on the girls, the other is on him. He decides he doesn’t care that they’re experimenting on him. But the girls…

He braids their hair, shows them ways to put it flat against their heads so that it doesn’t make a good tail for grabbing. They braid his hair so it does make a good tail for grabbing, and he lets them practice taking him down with it. He lets them. Even with their training, they would never be able to take him down. But he lets them. They are very cute.

And they sing. They know lots of songs, it turns out, and that only makes him adore them all the more. There is Люли, люли, люленьки, which the girls chant together while running laps. And there’s a slow eerie one called Тили-тили-бом that they recite during warm-ups (ballet, for strength and balance, and control.) It makes the guards nervous. And the Soldier can see why; they are small, and cute, but there’s something terrifying about all five little girl children moving in perfect unison and singing in high, girlish voices about the boogeyman.

The techs want to know who started the singing. They ask like it’s not important, but they are nervous too. Music like that is not part of the training. It’s not something they should know. But…

He is still humming it when Karpov takes him to the chair a few days later. His head was starting to ache anyway.

They call him Mishka. They have a song for when they practice throws with him: Мишка косолапый \-- the clumsy little bear.  He doesn't always remember them right away. Or he remembers them in pieces. Confused pieces. He gets their names messed up and they tease him for being so forgetful, but they don't mind. He doesn't mind. They sing, and so there is music in his home. As it should be.

He is their clumsy bear and they are his little widows. He has been a protector for a long time, the only protector of the motherland. But times are changing. The motherland needs more protectors. So he is teaching the widows to protect themselves so they can be protectors too.

He thinks, maybe, he should be protecting them from the guards and techs. He doesn’t know why he thinks that. He just does.

There is one widow in particular who stands out. She is very good at what she does, very promising, he hears the techs say. But they are worried that she is not obedient enough. They are worried that she questions too much. She is the one who sings. She has hair like bright copper, and eyes like emeralds, and a thin, fey face. She smirks a lot. It’s a strange expression on a five year old.

 

He has gone to the chair thirty times. It had been almost seventy two hours now, and he’s pretty sure that when they take him away this time, it will be to the tank instead. He has overheard one of the techs saying that the girls are going back to the Red Room. He doesn't really know what that is, but…

It means they will be leaving soon. He won’t remember them, but he will miss them. He is worried for them.

He is braiding the the red girl's hair. She is humming a song. “Во поле береза стояла / Во поле кудрявая стояла / Люли, люли, стояла / Люли, люли, стояла,” she sings, under her breath. The words dissolve into humming.

The guards are watching.

He speaks softly, barely moves his lips. “Natashka,” he says. She had corrected him earlier, when he thought she was Anechka. “Do they make you forget things, sometimes? Do they put you in a chair like mine? Or a tank? Tap your fingers once for yes. Twice for no.”

She goes still. She taps her fingers twice against her knee. Idly-seeming, in time with the music. She doesn’t even stop humming. Christ, she's clever.

[“Good. Then remember this: you gotta stop singing out loud. They don’t like it. But never stop singing on the inside. You can’t let them take that from you, okay baby girl?”](http://chikinan.tumblr.com/post/182488865245)

She taps once.

“You talk funny, Mishka,” she says, just as quietly.

“Yeah,” he says. “Happens when I been outta the tank too long. My Russian gets even fuckin’ worse and my English gets like… this. Whatever the fuck this is.”

She covers her smile with one hand at his language.

“That’s another thing, Natashka. Keep smiling. Smile on the inside, though. Only on the outside when they ask you to. It’s important, yeah? You gotta learn to be someone else on the outside, without losing who you are on the inside. Understand?”

She taps her fingers once.

“Soldat.” His handler is in the doorway. “It is time for maintenance.”

“Yeah,” he says. He pats the soft red braids and stands up. She twists around to watch him. They all do. They’re so small. “I'll see you around, kiddos.”

 

* * *

 

He wakes up, shivering. He is in the tank, the front of it hanging open. His knees give, and the guards are there to catch him. They lay him him out on the table. He is in a small space. The mobile base. They secure him to the table. Bright lights. Heat lamps. The techs take his vitals. _Within expected range._ Hands move him when he needs to be moved. He cannot say no. He cannot move himself. He cannot control the shaking. He cannot remember who he is.

They take him from the cryo room. He is in a larger base. Not Home Base. (Home Base?) This base has a Chair. He shudders when they go past the place where the Chair is. His whole body flinches away from it. His body remembers the Chair like it is a gun, a gun pointed at him. A gun that has shot him in the past, and will do so again.

But it isn’t time for the Chair yet. They take him into a small room. They make him sit. They strap him down. They stand guard, with their guns ready and pointed at him.

The handler comes in, with the book. Red book, black star. He says the words; slow, deliberate, each word slots into position in his head, shoving inside like a wedge. Breaking him open. He doesn’t scream, but only because his body remembers this, and remembers that this is not the worst pain he will know. The words continue, until his brain remembers what he is. And then: calm.

“Доброе утро, Солдат.”

“Я готов отвечать,” he says.

They uncuff him. There are men standing by, rifles at the ready. There are always men with guns. In case. They will shoot him, if he makes them. He thinks about making them. He doesn’t. Not this time.

The handler gives him a briefing, and sustenance: a bottle, with a straw. Something thick, and foul-tasting, and laced with stimulants. The more he drinks, the more attentive he becomes, like his mind is turning on more and more.

The target is Sergei Ivanovich: former KGB, former Hydra. For the last few years, he’s been lying low, but he’s resurfaced, and the rumor is that he’s reaching out to someone called Peggy Carter (Red dress, red lips, the Soldier thinks, without really knowing why) looking for a deal for himself and his daughter, Raisa. It is 2 May 1991. The deadline for his termination is 10 May, 1991.

“He won’t be easy to approach,” the Soldier reports, once he has finished the briefing.

“You will need an associate. We have a pool of candidates for you to choose from.”

 

The candidates are five small girls: widows in training from the Red Room, they tell him. They are perhaps seven years old — about the same age as Ivanovich’s daughter. But these girls have been trained, he can tell. When they demonstrate their abilities, he begins to wonder if _he_ helped train them. There is something familiar there, something he recognizes, like he recognizes his own reflection. Sometimes.

They demonstrate their hand-to-hand abilities, their command of different languages, their skills on the range. And they _are_ skilled, he can see. They demonstrate hand to hand combat against their handler. They demonstrate their abilities with firearms. They, for some reason, do ballet.

They are all very skilled, but he has been asked to choose the best of them. The best of them is the blonde one. Anna. But it’s a close thing, between her and Yelena and Natalia.

He chooses Natalia. He knows she’s the right choice. He isn’t sure why, but at this point, that just doesn’t bother him much anymore. He knows all sorts of things without remembering why.

 

They go out into the streets of Berlin. They are wearing civilian clothes. The Soldier wears a blonde wig and moustache, a hat, sunglasses. German comes out of his mouth, smooth and easy. His gait is different — smaller steps, scuffing his heels a bit, like a civilian. He vanishes into the crowd, as he is trained to.

He carries his associate on his hip. The Arm (concealed under a long-sleeved jacket, and leather gloves) is curled around her, tucked under her little butt, holding her against his side. She’s getting too big to be carried, but the Arm doesn’t tire, and holding her makes a convenient excuse to never use that Arm and accidentally reveal its unyielding nature. They’re walking down the street towards the church where the recital is due to be held.

Natalia — _no_ — his head twitches to one side, cracking his neck, resetting something inside. _Reset_ . _Natasha_ is dressed in a leotard and little pink skirt. Ballet slippers. Her red hair in a high bun. She rests her head against his shoulder, not minding the metal a bit.

The mission is to deliver Natasha to the church, where she will blend in with the other little girls, get close to Ivanovich, slit his throat, and get out.  He will monitor from afar. That is his mission. That was the briefing. The whole plan is simple: Ivanovich rarely surfaces. He will be out and relatively vulnerable during his daughter’s recital. A grown man wandering around would be suspicious, but a little girl — a little girl can — a little girl can get close and —

The Soldier cracks his neck again, jerking his head hard to one side and then the other. _Reset._ New imperatives. Little girls should not have to do that kind of thing.

They arrive at the community center. The spot where he is supposed to drop Natashka off. He walks past it, keeps walking.

“Papa?” Natashka says. This is his cover name for this op.

“Change of plans,” he says shortly. He lets her slide off his hip. She lands easily solid on her two little feet and he holds her hand with his flesh hand. They walk fast, make a couple of quick turns, and then sit on a bench not far from the church. Natashka sits beside him. Too still. He bumps her playfully with his metal elbow (gently, he’s not a fucking monster) and she kicks him in the calf.

Soon she’s swinging her legs and giggling. He’s sure it’s half-charade on her part, playing at being a normal girl. But sometimes playing at a thing is the next best thing, and all you can manage. Like a cover name. _Papa_ is his cover name. He can play at it; make her smile, make her giggle, call her by cutesy nicknames. Like a real papa.

A black car pulls up, as the briefing said to expect. A large man and a little girl in a ballerina’s costume get out.  

“Come on, Natashka,” the Soldier says.

“Natalie,” Natashka corrects, reminding him of their cover names.

“Right. Sure.”

_“Bitte sprechen Sie Deutsch, Papa,”_ she says, low and worried sounding now.

_“Ja,”_ He says absently. He nudges her. “Go up ahead. Make friends with the girl. Get her away, okay?”

_“Sehr gut,”_ Natashka says, then bounds ahead, every inch the bubbly ballerina she isn’t and never was. She goes up to the young girl, babbling in German, and girl, Raisa, is defenseless against her relentless charm assault.

The Soldier comes up beside the target. He knows how to walk like a civilian. He knows how not to draw attention. The target smiles. The Soldier’s face smiles back. “Cute, aren’t they?” the target says, in German. The Soldier’s brain makes it English for him.

He doesn’t trust his mouth to agree in German so he makes a laugh instead, nodding.

“She must be from one of the other classes. I don’t think we’ve met. Sergei Ivanovich.” The target holds out his hand. The target is left handed.

The Soldier takes his hand. He takes it with the left hand. “I know,” the Soldier says. His mouth makes it English. His mouth has an accent that he doesn’t recognize.

The target starts. The Soldier feels the man’s hand go tense, try to pull out. The Soldier squeezes slightly, hard enough for the target to feel the steel in his grip. Literally. The target’s face goes through several emotions, ending on one that the Soldier recognizes.

It is despair. He knows how it feels to have that expression.

The Soldier releases the target’s hand, and tucks both of his hands in his pockets. He appears casual. “If you scream, Natasha will kill the girl,” the Soldier says. They haven’t stopped moving forward. The girls are far ahead. No one can overhear them.

“I won’t scream,” the target answers quickly. Taking his cues from the Soldier, he speaks English too.  “Please. I don’t want--”

“Neither do I pal, but I got orders, see? We’ll drop these girls off at their recital. You can say goodbye. Wish her luck. Then you and I will step out back for a smoke. Alright?”

The target swallows. But he is brave in the face of despair; the Soldier can see it in his face, in the set of his jaw. He knows that there is no escape once the Soldier has been sent after you. He knows that it is his time to die, but the Soldier is letting him say goodbye. That is a kindness.

“Yes,” the target says.

 

It goes well. The target is dead, body disposed of, and the Soldier and Natasha are clear long before authorities discover the body. It goes well.

They punish him anyway. 

Disobedience is not tolerated. He knows this, so he accepts the punishment, but--

But--

He does not understand why there is punishment. He does not think he was disobedient. The target was eliminated. No one saw him. He and Natasha got away clean. He was only following orders. He only ever follows orders but--

They punish him anyway.

 

_Why did you deviate from the plan?_ They ask. He cannot see who is asking, not with both eyes swollen shut.

He doesn’t understand the question. No answer is better than a wrong answer, so he doesn’t answer.

Sharp pain across his face -- _which already feels like mashed hamburger thank you very fucking much, assholes_ \-- and then again. Clearer this time. “Why did you deviate from the plan, Soldat?”

He’s panting, hanging loose in the restraints, and his brain feels like badly shaken jelly, but he tries to think. There had been a plan, but the plan changed, mid-mission. He remembers that. “Reset,” he answers. “New imperative.”

“What new imperative,” they ask. Voice cold and hard and angry.

_Answer._ Come on. Find the answer, you know this. “Little girls. Shouldn’t have to--”

A sharp slap. _“Soldiers_ will do as directed. Who gave you this imperative?”

The Soldier’s brain skitters over this. No answer is better than a wrong answer.

They turn on the machine again. Electricity arcs. Pain. The body seizes. A scream. They turn off the machine.

“Who gave you this imperative?” they repeat.

_“I don’t know.”_

Pain.

_“Who gave you this imperative?”_

_Pain._

“No one!” he shouts, the words torn out of him. “No one gave me -- I-I gave me. Gave it--” The words stammer. He isn’t supposed to. There is a roaring in his ears. A train. “I gave the imperative,” he says again, and he knows it’s true, even if he doesn’t remember. “I did.” And his body, his mouth makes the words. The words bubble up in him. Gasp out. “32-- 3255… 7038. Barnes. J--”

They turn on the machine. They leave it on.

Distantly, he thinks he can hear screaming that isn’t his own. Distantly, he thinks he can hear a child wailing, and calling for _Mishka._ He wonders who that is.

 

They don’t realize he’s conscious, as they take him out of the restraints. He can’t move, can barely breathe. They talk over him, across him. Like he’s a pile of meat. The techs are reporting to the handler. Karpov. Telling him what he said, what he told them.

“Fuck,” says Karpov, in Russian. “Wipe him. Freeze him.”

“Sir,” says one of the techs, worried. “He’s sustained a lot of damage. We should--”

“He can take it. Wipe him. Freeze him.”

 

* * *

 

He wakes up. He hears the techs talking as the guards drag him away from the tank. He’s shivering, disoriented. He can barely hold his own weight. The techs are talking in Russian, but he understands them. His brain makes it English for him.

“This is absurd,” one of them is saying, angrily. “Since when do we bow down to those capitalist--”

“Since Alexander Pierce,” says another, drily. “Pierce wants him for this, so we’ll do it. But first, wipe him. We don’t want a repeat of ‘78.”

“We don’t want a repeat of last time is what we don’t want,” the first tech grumbles. “Up the voltage by 20%.”

“Shit, are you sure? Won’t that turn him into a vegetable?”

“If we’re lucky. According to the notes, he works best when he is a vegetable,” the tech says.

“Alright, alright. Seems redundant to me, but alright. Prep the chair.”

It is December, 1991.

 

* * *

 

_Help my wife. Please. Help._ _  
_ _Sergeant Barnes?_

 

* * *

 

It is 25 December, 1991. The latest batch of trainees (they were not small, why does he think they should be small?) have not been compliant.

The Soldier slams the gate closed and looks back, sees the other Soldiers gone wild. There is an emptiness in their eyes that is not like his emptiness. And now the emptiness in them has made them into storms -- it is the eye that their hurricanes forms around.

The Soldier clenches his jaw.

He could have told the handlers that this would happen. No one asked him, of course, but he could have told them. He knows more than he remembers. It doesn't add up to much, but it doesn't need to.

If you wanted protectors, you shouldn't have hired killers. You cannot forge a shield from a keg of gunpowder, and if you try it will blow up in your face.

 

By the next day, the Soldier and the handler are in a helicopter, leaving. The handler is sweating. The Soldier can understand why. He initiated lockdown procedures, gassed the whole place. Then they went back in and put all the other Winter Soldiers on ice before they could recover.

In short? The handler has failed. Failed to reproduce the Soldier, as he was asked. The Soldier knows how failure is rewarded. His Arm feels the ghost sensation of crunching through bone, into soft tissue.

“Where are we going?” the Soldier asks. It comes out in English.

The handler looks alarmed by this. “На русском,” he reminds the Soldier.

The Soldier repeats the question, in Russian this time.

The handler says they are going west. The handler says that they are going to the Red Room. The handler says that Madame B will help them. None of that means much to the Soldier, until the handler gives him coordinates.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Widows' songs:
> 
> Люли, люли, люленьки: it's a lullaby basically, couldn't find a recording that i actually like but the lyrics are sweet and about doves and it's cute.
> 
> [Тили-тили-бом](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BQGk6W-xI8): it's a lullaby if YOU HATE SLEEPING. it was maybe written for a horror movie but there are people who claim it's traditional. 
> 
> Мишка косолапый: the only youtube versions of this have left me scarred and horrified, so just trust me when i say it's a little kid's song about a clumsy bear who gets hit in the head sometimes. that is all.
> 
> [The Lonely Birch Tree](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwOHDO7DJXc): this is the song that Natasha is singing right before they take buckaroo to the chair. It's another traditional one, and v pretty imo. In Russian folklore, birch trees were considered protective guardians. Also it's in the Anna Karenina soundtrack which HAUNTS ME.


	5. Дальше нас двое

## 5

Только скажи -  
Дальше нас двое.  
Только огни  
Аэродрома.  
Мы убежим,  
Нас не догонят

\- [Нас не догонят](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IwnoUWR6xI) by t.A.T.u, 2002

 

He wakes up. There are five girls there, in the room with the Tank and the Chair. They stand between the guards and watch as he is defrosted. He watches them back, without knowing why.

There are five girls. One has red hair. One has brown hair. Two have black hair. One has blonde hair. They are standing at the edge of his vision when the Handler says the words. This means that they are part of his team. Field Command. Five girls. Five women. They stand at parade rest, and they watch, eerie quiet.

They should not be so quiet, he thinks, unbidden.

There is a tune in his head; soft voices, girl’s voices, singing a high melody. Laughing at him. _Мишка косолапый..._

He jerks his head to one side, like he can dislodge the song. It isn’t meant to be there, he knows.

 

This is not Home Base. This is not Siberia. Instead of concrete, there is polished wood, and… windows. Sunlight. Grounds. Trees. He cannot stop and stare, but he wants to, like it’s been years since he’s seen anything like it. Maybe it has been. He can’t remember.  He never does.

This is the Red Room, they tell him. Other girls, younger, walk the halls like ghosts, like they’re in a trance, feet moving in unison, eyes straight ahead, unseeing. They have bruises on their wrists.

He feels strangely at home among them, like he’s not alone anymore. There is something in their eyes that he recognizes from mirrors.

They lead him to a training room -- a dance studio. The five young women from when he woke up have come too. He looks closer now and sees that they are younger than he thought. Fourteen, perhaps fifteen. They are mostly grown, and they hold themselves like women do, but they are children still. Their cheeks are soft and round, their shoulders and torsos slim and limber. They are _children_. The thought rattles around the back of his head: something banging and loose in the old and rusted machinery of his mind.

The Handler is there, and a woman with severe blonde hair. She is Madame B, he is told. The girls are to be Widows, he is told. They will fight him, one on one, to see what their rankings will be. He is not to damage them. He mentally dials it back. Reminds himself to move as though he were a normal man of his size and weight, instead of… whatever it is that he is. He is not here to kill them.

This is a test. There are always tests.

 

First: the two black haired girls, one right after the other. Veselovskaya, Ekaterina Savvichna, and Volkova, Tatiana Ivanovna. 5’ 6” and 5’ 7”, respectively, both with hair like India ink spilling down their shoulders. They are specialists: a matched set. Katya has a stillness to her that he recognizes. (Sniper.) And Tanya’s eyes are sharp and searching. (Spotter.) Katya is dangerous, and strong for her size, and Tanya smiles, and somehow he knows that she can speak more languages even than he can. He can tell that Tanya’s good at codes and languages, and Tanya has a head for numbers and angles.

He wonders if he trained them. He doesn’t remember, but he thinks he must have.

Katya carries tiny knives, Tanya has a telescoping quarterstaff. Neither lasts more than thirty seconds against him. Both look fretful and worried by this, and he knows, instantly, that they are bottom of the class.

He thinks of a sound: the whisper of robes, the rattle of a rosary, the crack of something hard against his palm. His left palm. He rolls his metal shoulder.

He wants to reassure them. If they have made it this far, then they need not fear. If he is the one testing them, then they are good enough. He tries to smile. His face does not remember how.

Next: Belova, Yelena Olegovna. Majestic as a queen at 5’ 11”, hair like bleached wheat, with sad, too-knowing eyes. She looks him up and down and she doesn't even bother with her little electric throwing discs.

She is top of the class without trying, lasting almost a full minute.

She looks so sad about it. He wants to put an arm around her strong, wiry shoulders, pull her in and bump their heads together. _You’re alright, kiddo. I gotcha._

He doesn’t, of course

Then: Romanova, Natalia Alianovna. Hair like dried blood. Eyes like green sea-glass. 5’3”, 130 lbs. She circles him, and gauges his strength with a quick flurry of punches and kicks. He lets her, indulgent. Then, without warning, she just -- goes faster. He grabs, twists, parries. She swings herself up onto his shoulders, thighs clamped around him, restricting air and blood, bringing her elbow down on his head.

Fuck. Ow.

He heaves her over, onto the ground. She rolls before he can get his hand around her throat. She draws two batons. They crackle with electricity. She jams one hard, into his side, thinking to stun him.

 _Oh sweetheart. That’s nothing._ He breaks the baton with his flesh hand, bats the other one aside, and rolls forward, relentless. She tries to slide away, between his legs. He anticipates the move, and the next thing she knows, she’s fourteen inches off the ground, held up by her throat, her fingers clawing at the metal wrist.

“Enough.”

He drops her.

“Forty-five seconds,” Madame B reports. Yelena, who lasted 57, says nothing.

Natasha looks furious, he notices. She’s got fire. She wants to be the best. She wants to be able to do more than her little teenage body will allow. His mouth twitches on one side. _Don’t worry about it, kiddo. Most people don’t last fifteen._

“Next,” Madame B orders.

Orlova, Anna Anatolyevna. Hair like a bowl of nuts -- streaks of walnut, chestnut, almond brown all mixed in together. Eyes like a cow. Smile like innocence incarnate.

She has a pair of telescoping sabers that crackle with electricity, and the first thing she does is jab one hard up under his metal armpit.

It takes him off-guard. It doesn’t hurt, doesn’t achieve anything except --

Except something in his arm goes _fizzlePOP_ and suddenly there’s a millisecond delay between thought and action.

She lasts forty-eight seconds, before the Soldier’s Arm is curled around her throat and Madame B says _enough._

Released, Anya looks immediately to her rival, but --

The look that passes between them has not a speck of rivalry.

Anya says _put that in your pipe and smoke it_ with one raised brow.

Natasha’s sea-glass eyes flicker -- the barest hint of an eyeroll. _Showoff._ But it's fond. Fond like sisters, or something deeper than sisterhood, that comes when two people fall into sync so hard they leave only one set of footprints in the world.

“Belova is the clear leader,” Madame B notes, dispassionately. The quiet blonde one says nothing to this, does not look up from where she has fixed her eyes on a knot in the wooden floor. “Volkova is fifth and Veselovskaya is fourth.” The black haired girls are trying to be invisible. “But with only three seconds’ difference…”

“Soldat. Assessment,” says the handler.

“Romanova is the better fighter,” he reports, Russian flat and awkward in his mouth. “Orlova relies too heavily on the tech. No guarantee she’ll have tech. But Orlova will be the better operative.”

They’re both staring at him. Anya’s brown eyes are flat, showing nothing. Natasha’s full lips part briefly, forming a word, silently. _Mishka._ He was right -- Orlova will be the better operative. Natasha isn’t as good at hiding what she feels. Yet.

He blinks. Continues his assessment. “The face, the body. Romanova is... too striking.”

“We can fix the face,” Madame B points out, unimpressed.

The Soldier doesn’t look at Romanova, but he can all too easily imagine what Madame B is talking about: cheekbones broken, that nose crunched into a less aquiline shape, the jaw reformed --

He thinks of a jaw -- not Natasha’s -- delicate but stubbornly set under a pink, unhappy mouth, and the same mouth, the same stubborn chin, but the jaw made broad, square, heroic.

He blinks the meaningless image away. “Striking is… has a place. In the field,” he reports. He concentrates, makes sure to speak _Russian_ not _English._  “Better -- cheaper -- to keep her the way she is. But Orlova will be able to go places without being seen. Unremarkable. More useful than striking.”

Anya looks proud as punch about that. A strange sort of compliment. Some dusty part of his brain thinks she should be furious with him, but Anya couldn’t look happier to be considered _plain._

Natasha looks sidelong at her rival -- her _friend._ If they were a different pair of girls, he suspects that Natasha would nudge an elbow gently into her friend’s rib and grin. As it is, Anya meets Natasha’s gaze, and her one eye flickers, in a minimalist wink.

The Soldier’s chest is suddenly hollow. He feels, keenly, the Absence. He doesn’t remember, but he knows. There was someone who used to look at him like that. There is an empty place at his side, where someone should be. He is a Natasha without an Anya. He doesn’t remember, but he knows. He knows.

“Soldat?”

He blinks, fast and hard. His hand comes up to his face. It is wet. They are staring. His face is still, flat, showing nothing. But his eyes -- his vision blurs. Why? He doesn’t remember what it is that he misses.

The Arm gives a half-hearted calibration loop, grinding on the down-loop. He shrugs, swings his arm in the reset motion, but it gives an angry buzz.

Madame B sniffs. “Looks like your dinosaur needs maintenance.”

The Handler -- Karpov -- gives a look like he just took a bite of lemon, and grabs the Soldier on his way out.

He gets one last look at the girls. They all wear identical blank expressions. But their eyes. They know. They understand.

The blonde one. Yelena -- _Lenushka,_  the pale little spider with her hair like gold, like a memory half-forgotten -- she lifts her eyes from the wood to look at him, and there are wells of sadness there, deep as his own, though not as old.

She knows. She understands.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes up. There are four young women there. One has red hair. One has brown hair. Two have black hair. They are perhaps sixteen. They all look very solemn.

They have a mission in California. They are to infiltrate a club, where the Widows will extract intelligence from a CIA operative. He isn’t told what intelligence. He doesn’t need to know, sothey don’t tell him. He is the fallback, if all else goes wrong. He is backup and extraction. Anya -- _Orlova, Anna Anatolyevna, 5’1”, born 1983_ \-- is running point. She’s sixteen, but she looks about sixty, behind her soft brown eyes.

They get their gear for the op. The girls get dressed up like California girls, in short shorts and shorter shirts. The Soldier is given a Hawaiian shirt. He has a fanny pack. He also has a silicon cover for the Arm, and a cast on his forearm to mask the size difference. There’s a stiletto stashed in the cast, of course. His hair is long, but they bleach streaks into it, and give him huge sunglasses.

The outfit makes him cringe. It also makes Natalia laugh at him until tears run down her face. He snaps his sunglasses down with a growl before heading out.

 

They bounce from the Red Room to a train station to Marco Polo Airport in Venice. He is Mr. Jacob Barnett _(your name is Drakov Ilyich Baranovsky.)_  He works in Silicon Valley. He is upper-middle-class. Anya is his daughter, Anne Barnett. Natasha becomes Natalie Roland, Katya is Kathleen Fisher, and Tanya is now Tina Wolff. Anne, Natalie, Kathleen and Tina are best friends, on their way home from the best spring break that Anne's dad could buy for them.

It’s a long flight from Venice to Newark to Sacramento, and the drive from there to the hotel seems to take years. It’s night, and the lights flash by. The girls sleep, three in the back, sprawled all over each other. Katya and Tanya have their heads on Natasha’s shoulders. Anya has her head tucked up against the window, eyes closed. They look young in the passing lights of the street lamps.

 

They check into a hotel suite. He sleeps on one of the queen beds in the second bedroom and the girls all pile together like puppies into the king bed in the master bedroom.

 

Twenty four hours later, the girls are dolled up enough to pass for over-eighteens. Something tight and angry builds in the Soldier’s guts as he watches them paint each other’s faces and nails. Anya is adjusting the padding in her bra. He looks away.

“Mishka?” Natasha says, and holds out a hair clip to him. He takes it, and follows her directions, pinning her red curls up and then watching as she bounces a little to shake them into place, to let them settle.

“I’ll be watching,” he promises them. He says it in English. “If you need an extraction, you know what to do.”

He says it three more times before they all part ways to meet up at the club.

 

The girls will not have trouble getting into the club. They will be entering through the front door, one at a time and spaced out, with false IDs and sickening smiles. Meanwhile, he tears a vent out of place on the roof, and rappels down into the guts of the building, unseen.

Soon enough, he’s hidden in the darkened rafters of the club. He can feel the bass thumping in his chest, smell a hundred sweaty bodies and at least that much cologne and perfume, not to mention the sticky/sweet/alcohol smell of spilled drinks. He’s watching the crowd, monitoring the Widows, looking for the target.

There’s a lot going on. He wishes for the goggles they sometimes give him, to cut down on distractions. There are many distractions.

He watches a young couple -- a man, a woman, they’re at the back of the club, they found a dark corner, and they’re so close -- his thigh between her legs, her hands clutching his back, still moving to the beat, but harder now, more desperate. They’re chasing something, both their faces twisted up in almost-pain. Something winds tight, low in the Soldier’s belly. Heat rises in his cheeks. His heart pounds.

 _How long’s it been, huh pal?_ says a voice in his head, low and rough. “Too fuckin’ long,” the Soldier whispers.

“Mishka?” One of the girls whispers back, questioning.

“Nothing,” he says. “All clear up here.”

“I’ve got him,” says Anya. “Northwest corner.”

He turns his attention and sees the man -- the Target. Handsome like a movie star with his dark hair slicked back and swagger in his step. He feels a strange… He has a sudden mental image -- like a memory, but it seems impossible -- of looking in a mirror and seeing someone like _that_ looking back. Someone full of swagger and confidence. A smirk. _Hey doll, you’re a swell dish,_ he hears in his head, like he’s saying it. He can imagine this guy -- the Target -- saying it. What a dope. Cocky little shit.

The Soldier almost feels sorry for him. Poor bastard doesn’t stand a chance.

 

This isn’t a kill mission. If it were, the Soldier would have come alone. This isn’t a capture and interrogate mission, either. If it were, they would’ve only come with one or two Widows. This is more complicated than either of those. The Widows are here to interrogate the target without him realizing that he’s being interrogated, and that’s a much more difficult job. Beyond the Soldier’s capabilities, certainly.

Katya and Tanya move within earshot of the target, talking about something apparently innocuous, but probably designed to create certain associations in the Target’s subconscious. Even the Soldier doesn’t really know what that’s about. It’s not relevant to his mission here.

Then Natasha comes up to the bar beside the Target, speaking in Romanian on a cell phone, with all her curves on display. The Target eyes her and the Soldier feels the sudden urge to reach down his throat and violently remove his spinal cord.

Natasha hangs up the phone and leans in to order a drink. The Target says “allow me,” in Romanian, and orders a drink for her.

“You speak Romanian?” Natasha says, in English.

“You speak English,” the Target replies, smirking. _What an asshole._

And they’re off to the races. They’re talking about Bucharest, about their favorite sights, about the food, and the Soldier has no idea what Natasha is looking for, what she’s trying to get out of him, but it’s clear from the set of her shoulders that she’s not finding it. Minutes pass, and she keeps talking, keeps smiling, but her shoulders are getting more and more tense.

“Natalia,” Anya says sharply into the comms, after she’s been all but grilling the man for nearly twenty minutes. His brows are starting to acquire a curious set. “Pull back, you’re making him suspicious.”

Natalia takes another swig of her drink and excuses herself for a moment. As soon as she’s out of earshot, she’s speaking into the comms: “I almost had him. Let me keep going.”

“He doesn’t know,” Anya says.

“But--” Natalia starts.

 _“He doesn’t know,”_ Anya repeats. “We’re done here.”

Whatever they were looking for, they didn’t find it. Whatever they thought the Target knew, he didn’t. Whatever happened in Romania, this guy didn’t have anything to do with it.

The Soldier immediately starts making his way back through the rafters, already planning his route out.

 

They meet at the extraction point: a small, private airfield. By the time the Soldier gets there, the girls are already there, and something has clearly gone very, very wrong, because Katya and Tanya are screaming at Natasha. The Soldier pulls up just in time to see the redhead go down to a sucker punch from Katya that even _he_ didn’t see coming.

He throws himself out of the car.

“What the fuck?” He bellows.

Natasha looks up, wiping blood from her mouth, her split lip. “I’m just being realistic,” she snaps, but in his head he hears another voice, saying _I’m just telling the truth._ And _someone’s gotta say it._ And _I can’t just do nothing._ And for a moment -- for a moment --

“Sometimes I think you like being punched,” he says, like he’s a puppet and someone’s hand is working his jaw, and he’s swept up in it, caught in a riptide of --

_Little punk can barely stand his head’s probably ringing so hard. That’s his one quote-unquote “decent” jacket covered in alley trash, too. How’s he supposed to take Stevie to the Expo when he smells like Red Hook in July?_

_“I had him on the ropes.”_

_The swell of fondness is thick enough to choke on. What a dumbass._

\-- The Soldier shudders all over. Malfunction. He shakes his head hard, like a dog, and grabs Katya by the collar of her jacket before she can throw another punch. She’s screaming in some language he doesn’t recognize, almost Russian but almost something else too. He thinks it might be made up -- there aren’t many languages he doesn’t speak.

“Cut that out, come on,” he says, holding Katya off the ground like a kitten by the scruff. “We ain’t got time for this. We got a plane to catch.” He drops her, and she lands easily on her feet. She might not be as fast as Natasha or as smart as Anya, but she’s still one of the best he’s ever seen. And she’s a _sniper,_  like him. She’s _never_ like this -- rash, impulsive… she’s got sniper stillness all the way down into her bones.

She glares at him, and straightens her jacket. She deliberately turns her back on Natasha. The Soldier glances to Anya, who’s supposed to be running this goddamn op, but Anya is just tuned out, staring at her phone. That’s not like her. It’s not like Natasha to be cruel to her sisters. It’s not like Katya to lash out. It’s not like Tanya to say nothing. The Soldier doesn’t know how he knows that their behavior is uncharacteristic, only that he knows.

“What the hell is wrong with you guys?”

They all stare at him like he’s broken their goddamn hearts. Even Natasha, tough as nails, looks suddenly brittle.

“Plane’s here,” Anya says, cutting off any further conversation. And sure enough, a moment later they hear the whine of engines.

 

Soon they’re all bundled inside, listening to the rumble of takeoff. The belly of the plane is cold. The girls sit very still and don’t shiver, even though they are very much not dressed for sitting in a freezing cargo hold. They’re all staring out at nothing. The thousand yard stare.

“What happened?” he asks. Because something happened. Something beyond a simple failed mission. It wasn’t their fault that the target didn’t have the intel. The mission went smoothly, even if it was a bust. That is different from failure. They’re all acting fucking _weird._ He knows something happened, even if he can’t remember what.

They stare at him, eerie unison, eerie silence.

“You don’t remember...” Katya is the one who speaks, her black hair is long and loose around her shoulders.

He frowns. “I don’t remember anything.”

Katya turns her face and hides in Tanya’s shoulder. Tanya curls an arm around her and glares at him. Like it’s his fault. Maybe it is. He doesn’t remember. Tanya pulls Katya closer, then starts whispering to her, low, in that language he doesn’t know. He thinks she might have invented it. Tanya’s good with languages.

Natasha meets his eye across the space between them. She tips her head to one side, very slightly, expression grim, her lower lip split and swollen. She doesn’t speak aloud, but he can read lips. _Lena didn’t come back from Romania,_ Natasha mouths.

That explains what intel they were trying to get. They were trying to find out what happened in Romania. And they didn’t succeed -- their target didn’t know. But the Soldier shakes his head. He still doesn’t understand. Natasha continues:

 _Lenushka --_ she stops, swallows, like the pet name is poison. She looks to Anya.

Without further prompting, Anya takes over, finishing the thought that choked even Natasha. _She used to look after them,_ Anya elaborates, jerking her head towards Katya and Tanya. _We…_ She stops, then looks away, pained by the obvious blankness on his face.

_Who the hell is Lena?_

 

* * *

 

He wakes up. There are three young women there. One has red hair. One has brown hair. One has black hair.

The one with black hair is Tanya. She is good with codes, good with language, trained as a spotter. She is dead behind her eyes. Natasha and Anya can’t even look at her. He wants to ask why, but that is not part of his briefing. That isn’t part of what he needs to know.

This is what he needs to know: Tanya is a spotter without a sniper. He is a sniper without a spotter. They have a target.

 

While they’re waiting for the target to appear, Tanya says, so quietly that he can almost pretend he didn’t hear it:

“I’ll be next.”

Without taking his eye away from the scope, he says: “What?”

“You forgot the others.”

“I forget everyone,” he points out. He knows this. “It’s nothing personal, Doll. Ya know I can’t help it.”

“You’ll forget me next.”

“So remind me the next time I see you,” he says, a little irritated.

She laughs, hollow. “You won’t see me again.”

She doesn’t say anymore. When he tries to talk, she snaps out a command phrase in Russian, something he can’t refuse. She is Field Command, after all.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up. There are two Widows there when they say the words. They will be field command. They are the Red Widow and the Black Widow: one brown-haired and brown-eyed, the other with waves of dark auburn falling to her shoulder. Not quite her natural color, but something close, he knows. He doesn’t know how he knows. They look over at him -- one smooth turn, both of their heads, in unison, like they can feel him watching.

 

The widows go with him to the mission briefing. The mission is to crush a bratva stronghold. The bosses there helped themselves to some materiel that was not theirs to take. The Red Room has been tasked with taking out the base and retrieving the materiel. They will be outnumbered at least ten to one; the facility is highly secure.

The Soldier needs only to roll his left shoulder and glance at the two young women to know that these bratva bozos don’t stand a chance.

 

After it’s all over, the three of them wait for extraction, sitting amidst the smoking rubble on crates of spooky weapons and advanced scanners, pleasantly sore from their exertions, and with the worst of the blood cleaned off their faces.

Natasha starts humming. Anya is sitting cross-legged on the crate, and Natasha is sitting in front of her with her head tipped forward. Anya is redoing her braid, having combed out the worst of the dried blood and ash. Anya is singing while she twines the strands together.

“Встань ты, мой милый, проснися, / Ты, душа моя, пробудися. / Люли, люли пробудися, / Люли, люли пробудися…”

The Soldier is transfixed by the singing. The melody haunts him, echoes in his ribcage, and draws something out: girlish voices, little feet moving on concrete floors, the echo of a laugh. The echo of how a laugh _feels,_  coming out. “The… song,” he says.

They both look up at him. Anya stops singing, with the end of Natasha’s braid still in her hands. Their eyes are wide, brown eyes and sea-green, fixed on him.

He clears his throat. His voice is rusty. He hasn’t spoken since he came out of the tank, except to confirm orders and issue terse reports in his strange, choppy Russian. He speaks Russian like a drunkard, he knows. He speaks Russian like the words are slippery, uncertain jello, awkward in his mouth.

He isn’t speaking Russian now.

“There was a song,” he says again. “Another song.” He says it more confidently now.

“Мишка косолапый,” says Anya. Her hands are moving again. She puts the hair tie on the end of Natasha’s braid, holding it in place. “The clumsy little bear,” she translates. She’s speaking calmly, like none of this is unusual. She looks up at him, her wide brown eyes. Cow eyes. Kind eyes. “We didn‘t think you knew about that.”

“I don’t,” he says. “But…”

They wait, patient. They know that sometimes his words are slow to come. Sometimes they don’t come in the right order, or the right language. His brain is a dumpster full of broken, rotting things, but sometimes something comes skittering out, whole and entire; a rat or a cockroach, hard to catch, but…

“There used to be more of you,” he says, faint and unsure.

They both look a little sick when he says it, like he said something awful. He swallows. He shouldn’t anger them. They are still Field Command. He shouldn’t --

But more than that, he doesn’t like to see them upset. _Little girls shouldn’t be --_ But they aren’t little. _Anymore._  They aren’t little _anymore._

His head hurts.

He rubs his temples hard with his fingers, trying to get his garbage-dump-brain to fucking cooperate for fucking once. “You were smaller. There were more of you. You sang.”

He looks up. Natasha has her hands over her mouth. Anya’s brown eyes are full.

“You remember,” she says, quiet.

He nods, stiff and slow.

Natasha smacks Anya’s arm. “I told you,” she hisses. “I told you it couldn’t be permanent. If it was permanent they wouldn’t have to keep doing it, _I told you.”_

Anya smacks back and says something low and quick that isn’t any language he knows.

“There’s a lot I don’t remember. But sometimes… Sometimes I know things I don’t remember,” he explains, slow and careful.

They look at him again, that eerie unison; like they’re two bodies sharing one train of thought.

“Are you trying to remember anything in particular?” Anya asks, taking point as usual (as usual?)

“Because we can help,” Natasha says, determined as always, her little jaw set, her little fists clenched, ready to back up her friends with whatever they need, with anything they ask for --

“Do you know any other songs?” he asks, frankly. “I…” he mustn’t say _like_ , he isn’t permitted that, he knows, but he knows… “There should be music,” he says. “Do you know any other songs?”

They do.

It’s a long wait for the extraction team. They sing the rest of the song about the birch trees. Anya and Natasha run through their old ballet warmup, singing _Tili tili bom,_  which is apparently a Natasha original composition. They sing him a song about America playing the fool, and Natasha…

Natasha sings a song that she heard on a mission in Paris. About life, about love, about rose-colored glasses. It is the shivering crack in a dam inside him. _“Et dès que je t'aperçois / Alors je sens dans moi / Mon cœur qui bat \-- la dadada deeda, la dadada deeda, duh dah dah dah... ” _ she finishes, and the floodgates open. Like a sunrise in his chest, something unfurling, expanding to fill his empty corners. The hairs on his one flesh arm are standing up. His metal one is humming like a struck bell.

Innocent as a lamb, seaglass eyes wide, Natasha turns to him. “Eh?” she says, like she’s asking his opinion of the song.

It’s good. He knows it’s good. His whole body is still, but vibrating at the frequency of that song, somehow. Anya is watching him closely. Her eyes go to Natasha. Natasha looks back, and he can see the silent words passing between them, even if he can’t understand them.

“What about you?” Anya asks. Her English is very good, he notices. He thinks she’s been on missions to America, maybe, by the way she flattens her vowels. “Do you know any songs?”

He blinks, rapidly. His neck tweaks to one side. Reset. Does he know any songs? Does he?

And suddenly it’s like they’re all bubbling up inside him. Music, boiling under his skin. And he feels…

Well, it’s like the lady in the song said. He feels his heart beat. He feels _alive._

“Do I know any songs?” he says, and the words come out strange-sounding. Flat, and funny. “Yeah, doll. I think I know a few.”

And abruptly, he’s up, on his feet, setting his gun aside, and it’s easy -- it’s easy as anything to take little Natasha in his arms and start moving. His feet know this. Step, step, triple-step, step, step -- and she’s surprised in his arms, stiff for a moment, and then moving. And his voice, rusty -- no words, but a melody, one that he knows. _“Bah badoo bap bap bap--”_ and then Anya’s laughing, and joining in. She knows this too. He knows it. He can hear the clarinets in his head. The trombones. The swinging backbeat of it, the jazzy tempo. He’s got the whole band up there, loud as life. Anya sings the trumpet part, he sings the saxophones, and Natasha laughs and laughs and laughs as he whirls her around the dusty concrete floor, in the ruined remains of the bratva base.

He takes them through the rest of _In the Mood_ and _A String of Pearls_ before words start to come back to him. He slow dances with Natasha to _All of Me_ and he pulls Anya off her seat and bops with her through _Cheerful Little Earful._

Both girls know the steps -- of course they know, they’re _dancers._  They know how to Lindy Hop and Charleston and Breakaway -- what’s more, they know _new_ steps. Triple-step, rock-step, the way they started doing it on the East Coast in the forties and fifties, a bit simplistic and rigid for his taste, but then Natasha gets Anya to sing them something a little slower and she shows him a few steps of the way they do it on the West Coast these days. And boy howdy does he like that: slinky, lazy, the feel of it, the way it makes him _move._

 _“Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars,”_ Anya sings, while Natasha pulls away, out to the end of their linked arms, before swaying back in close, pushing off his hand. Like they’re connected by a long, elastic tether, swinging around, feeling the music. He’s got the hang of the grip he needs here -- loose, but at the same time unbreakable. It’s his left hand -- it does unbreakable pretty darn well.

The song comes to an end, and he spins Natasha into a dip. By this point, both girls are flush-faced and grinning. Too many teeth for them to be normal girls. They smile like wolves. They smile like monsters. _Tili tili bom,_ he thinks. _Close your eyes quick, someone’s walking by the window, and knocking at the door..._

He’s not kidding himself: they’re all monsters here. He’s not a clumsy little bear, any more than they are ordinary girls. But he also knows that they can pretend, together, and that the pretending can be fun. They’ve still got a couple hours before the extraction team gets here. It’s as good a way to pass time as any other. He crooks a finger at Anya, who bounces up, delighted to be asked. But when she reaches out to take his metal fingers, he just passes her along to Natasha, who laughs.

Natasha takes the lead -- she’s taller, just barely, and it’s more her style. Anya dimples at her, bright and happy and trusting. It’s a front, probably, but one that she’s particularly good at. It’s what makes her the better Widow, he knows. She’s got a face you trust, a face that looks like it trusts you.

There should be more of them, he thinks. There should be others, but he can’t quite remember them.

And anyway, there are two now, moving together in a slow, natural rhythm. A slowdance. They need a song for this. He knows just the one.

 _“We’ll meet again,”_ he sings for them. _“Don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day…”_

They move like they’re reading each other’s thoughts, not just physical cues. They move like one brain in two bodies. It’d be eerie, except that he knows what that feels like. He doesn’t remember, quite -- but he knows. He knows what it’s like to have another person at your side, who’s as much a part of you as your own arm.

But he knows better than most, that amputations can happen.

 _“Keep smiling through, just like you always do,”_ he croons for them, in his slightly rusty baritone. _“Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away…”_

They can pretend, at least. For now.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Damn you Bucky for being so musical and making me post a bajillion links....
> 
> [Не валяй дурака, Америка](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQtDgU_AywQ) is the song about "america playing the fool." It's a russian pop song by a group called Lyube, who incidentally wrote the chapter title song for Ch. 4. 
> 
> The song about hearts beating is OF COURSE [La Vie En Rose](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFzViYkZAz4)
> 
> And then Bucky does an acapella version of [In The Mood.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XElwAwS0GvE) Yes there ARE acapella lyrics for In The Mood but Bucky doesn't sing them because words are hard. He also serenades them with [A String of Pearls,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP7EOThDi88) [All Of Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gfhQ91rwZ8) (not the John Legend version obv), and [Cheerful Little Earful](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCywcs06zIg). Then Anya sings "Fly Me To The Moon" while Natasha teaches Bucky West Coast swing, and whatever you do do not imagine the two of them [doing competitive swing dancing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM8okdQN5Fc) because your heart might explode. Also under no circumstances should you listen to [We'll Meet Again](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsM_VmN6ytk) because it's Just Too Much.
> 
> If you need to scream at me, I'm [here](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr. See you next time!


	6. Достать чернил и плакать!

## 6

Be afraid of the old, they'll inherit your souls  
Be afraid of the cold, they'll inherit your blood  
Apres moi le deluge, after me -- flood  
Февраль. Достать чернил и плакать!

\- [Aprés Moi](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbeHq1CLqJ8) by Regina Spektor, 2006. (Russian lines from "February" by Boris Pasternak)

 

He wakes up. There is a Widow there when they say the words. She is Field Command, they tell him. Her hair is black, pulled back in a severe braid. She takes him for debriefing.

The target is Anna Orlova. She has training as a Widow, but she has abandoned the cause. She must be eliminated.

“Your dinosaur won’t be able to do it alone,” Madame B says, sneering.

“Are you really going to send this little girl after her own partner? After you spent so long raising them as sisters?” the Handler shoots back. Did Karpov always sneer at Madame B like that? Or is this a new thing? The Soldier notices things like this, without giving any sign that he has. But he has become very adept at reading the people who hold his leash. You never know when the hand that feeds you will turn into the hand that beats you.

“I’m not a girl, I’m a widow. They don’t call us that for no reason.” The Widow lifts her chin, defiant. Black hair. Why does he think it should be red?

“She’s not even the best,” Karpov says.

“I will be,” Black Widow says, her eyes glassy but not transparent -- like one-way glass. Why does he think they should be clear like sea-glass? “Once Orlova is eliminated.”

 

Intel says that the Target is in Moscow. They arrive by train. The cover is that they are boyfriend and girlfriend. He puts his hair up in a bun. She lets her black hair out of its braid. She looks older than she is. She looks…

Sometimes, he thinks she should be small. Smaller than she is. She was small, once, but now she is big. Still smaller than him, but bigger than she was. She used to be... skin and bone (he knows this, the feel of frail bird-bones under his hands, showing her where to aim her blows, how to break his hold) but now she is hard muscle under soft curves.

She still fits under his arm. (Still?) It is the metal one, around her shoulders. She can bear the weight of it easily enough. It provides her with protection from potential attack, and means that if he has to touch anyone else, he will naturally be using his unoccupied (meat) hand. It makes good tactical sense all around.

Also, she doesn’t flinch when she touches the metal. He… likes that.

They are wandering through the city together, apparently aimless, but working in a grid, hunting.

“Clear,” she reports, in Russian, when they have cleared another block. His brain makes it English for him. He’s not sure why it does that. They move to the next block. “Should we split up? We’ll cover more ground.”

It is unusual for Field Command to ask his opinion. He likes that too. He stands a little straighter, then shifts back into the conscious hunch -- invisible, subservient. She is still Field Command, even if she asks his opinion, and fits so meekly under the Arm.

“No,” he replies. “She’ll be expecting that. She’ll be looking for a big guy and a gal who moves like a dancer, checking the city in a coordinated grid. She won’t be lookin’ for this.” He squeezes her very gently with the metal arm. It hums softly. She won’t be looking for a couple, he means. It’s inefficient, and...

She looks at him curiously. “Public displays of affection make people uncomfortable.”

He nods. His face makes a smile. She smiles back, which makes him feel warm.

She grabs his collar and tugs his head down towards her. Gently. She puts her mouth on his. Soft.

He is.

He.

He doesn’t remember this, but his body knows how to do it. His lower lip between hers. Warm. Wet. He is supposed to push back. He does, sweetly. She doesn’t taste waxy, and he’s not sure why his body thinks she should, or why his body wants to swipe the red from his mouth when she pulls away. There was no red on her lips, so why does his body think that there would be red on his?

“I’ve got eyes on her,” Natasha says.

It takes him a beat too long to answer. “Okay. Let’s move.”

She kisses him again, softly, on the mouth, and -- it’s not _sexual_ , per se. He can’t remember ever being touched like this, but he understands the mechanics, understands what it should be like, and this isn’t that. This is something bigger, and deeper, and altogether _stranger._

Field Command never acts like this. She is Field Command, but she… she is something else too, he thinks.

 

They follow the Target to her hidey hole. It is in the children’s ward of a hospital, for terminal patients. Which is good thinking, tactically. Security is high. There are always people around. They cannot move on her without appearing to be attacking children, and everyone turns into a hero when a child’s life is at stake. It makes every passing civilian into her personal bodyguard.

They are watching from afar. They have abandoned their civilian clothes and wear tactical gear instead. They are hoping for an opportunity.

They both know that they won’t get one, but they have an excuse to stall, so they’re taking it.

“Do you remember me?” She asks quietly, out of the blue. They’re speaking in English now, and have been for a while, he realizes.

“Nah,” he says, knowing that she doesn’t mean from five minutes ago, or two hours ago, or even yesterday.  “But I.” He blinks hard, to clear his vision, which is suddenly swimming. “I know -- I thought --” there's a terrible tension building in him, fear, the terror of doing something without knowing why “--you--I thought you were--” He gasps. “Smaller,” he says, at last. “I thought you were smaller, I thought--”

She touches his shoulder. The Arm registers the pressure. It breaks the loop his speech has fallen into.

“I was. I called you Mishka. We all did.”

All?

“Your memory was always so bad. They’d take you away, you’d come back all… confused. You used to mix us up. Me and Anya especially.”

She swallows, something thick in her throat. She coughs a little, and continues, voice steady.

“I think you could tell that we were the only ones who would make it through, especially after Yelena didn’t come back from that mission in Romania. Didn’t stop you from loving the others just as much. Ekaterina, Tatiana...”

The little nicknames they had come to him in a rush, like air escaping the lungs of a drowning man. Katyushka, Tanyechka, Lenushka, bubbles up in his head. Natashka, here beside him. Anechka, with her cow eyes.

And grief. He feels the hollowness, the loss of them. Lena lost on mission in Romania. Katya and Tanya killed. Anya with her death hanging over her like Damocles, with him and Natasha headlining as the fucking sword. And if they refuse, Hydra will just send someone else. Little Anya, probably not so little anymore, her mouse-brown hair, her big brown eyes. As good as gone already.

And… farther back. Other little girls. Three of them. Dark hair. Blue eyes, brown eyes. Smiles. His… sisters. Little sisters. Becca... Susan… Jeanie...

They’re gone now. Everyone is gone now. He knows that. He doesn’t remember, exactly. He has no context, but he knows.

He looks over at her. Natalia. Natasha. Natashka. She is tiny. She is bigger than she was. His sisters are gone. Her sisters are gone. “Did they make you kill the others too?” he asks, his voice low, but shaking. This is not compliance, he knows, and it scares him, it _scares him._

“Not all of them,” she says. She does not seem bothered by his noncompliance.

“Bastards,” he says, voice harsh in his throat like glass. “Mother _fuckers,"_  he says. He is shaking.

She pushes at his shoulders, sits him up. She pulls him in, and puts her arms around his neck, not in a chokehold, but something softer. She puts her hand in his hair, cradles the back of his skull. The other is wrapped around his shoulders. He doesn’t know what to do -- is this punishment? But the body remembers. He puts his arms around her. They are shaking. They are both shaking -- him and her.

She was small, and now she is bigger. He thinks of lips -- not full like hers, or red like the ones he remembered before. Pink lips. Thinned and angry and twisted with hurt. _I thought you were smaller, I thought you were smaller, I thought--_

“I need to tell you--” she starts, pulling back. “There are things I need to tell you, about--”

“You’re going to run for it,” he says, the realization hitting him like a -- like a train. Like the bottom of a ravine. “You’re going to run for it.”

Her eyes widen in surprise, in fear. “How did you--”

“It’s my job to read people.” He can read anyone. Anyone but himself.  

She  swallows, then nods, fast and furtive. She is so fucking young, he thinks. She knows how to pass for thirty, but she can’t be more than twenty. Eighteen, maybe. She’s a kid.

“I’m going in. Anya and I will--”

“No,” he says. “You won’t make it,” he tells her. He’s seen it before -- he’s been sent after people who tried to run. In Berlin, in Kabul, in... New York. And this? Hydra’s all around them, waiting for them to report back in, waiting to confirm the kill. Karpov already suspects, and Madame B does too, if she’s not stupid. There’s no room for them to run away, to time to give them a head start.

“We can -- the two of us can--”

“You won’t. You’ll both end up dead.” He grabs her shoulders, squeezes. “You have to go it alone.”

She looks horrified by this. She had four sisters. She’s always had sisters. Before. “But -- if you come with us--”

He shakes his head. “No. Trackers. In the Arm. And there are words. Activation, deactivation. I'd be no goddamn help. I'd be a liability. Natashka.” He holds her gaze. “I’d stay behind, hold them off for you, but trust me. It won’t work. You know it won’t work. This isn’t the right time. This is the worst possible place. Anya and me… we’d just get you killed.”

Her bottom lip trembles. She’s just a kid. Jesus. Just a kid.

“I won’t do this,” she says.

Her face all twisted up, like--

“I won’t kill _Anya,_ she’s--”

like--

The world fades and blurs around him. He doesn’t really hear what she says next. There’s a rushing in his ears. Like wind. And a face over hers, not hers, but the same expression, the same -- _hang on! --_ the same ugly twist of -- _grab my hand!_ \-- of hurt and fear and -- _no!_ \-- and loss.

“Shh, it’s okay,” he tells her -- tells them both. Her and the other one. He puts a hand on her cheek, like he couldn’t before. It’s the metal one. She leans into it anyway, sensors picking up the pressure, the warmth. It grounds him. He tells her -- and it’s important, it’s something he wanted to say before, something he should have said before, to the other one, the other face. It’s what Anya would say, if she were here. He knows, without remembering.

“Sometimes, you can only save yourself.” He rubs his thumb over her cheekbone. She doesn’t cry. He wishes she would.

He pulls her in with a hand on the back of her neck and kisses her forehead, swift and fierce. “Come on, now. You and me. We got work to do.”

She makes a strange, choked sound, like he just stabbed her. “Не́ было бы сча́стья, да несча́стье помогло́,” she says.

His brain makes it English, makes it different, but the same. “Yeah yeah, if it wasn’t for bad luck, we wouldn’t have no luck at all,” he says. He swallows. “You brought explosives?”

It’s the best option they have. The most efficient way to complete the mission. It’s what the handlers will expect of them. Anything else will raise suspicions.

Natasha nods.

 

She has to set the explosives -- he is too big to get in through the vents, too broad to squeeze into secret places and set the charges. He can’t do that part.

But he pulls the detonator out of her hands at the last moment. “You don’t need that in your head. And I ain’t gonna remember, sweetheart,” he says. “We’ll tell them you did it. Alright?”

Her eyes are dry. “Alright,” she says. She is hollow. Like him, she has been hollowed out.

He pushes the button. The hospital burns.

 

He makes Natasha stay behind while he goes into the smoking remains to confirm the kill. She already looks haunted, like Anya's ghost is already there, already tormenting her. She is. She always will be. Natasha will carry Anya's ghost for the rest of her life. He knows: even if she manages to forget, somehow, the ghost will still be there. He does not remember learning this, but he knows.

There is not much left, but he knows all their dental impressions. He doesn't remember learning them, but he knows.

He knows.

 

Afterwards, while they’re at the safehouse, waiting for retrieval, he thinks it might have been a kindness. Anechka and the rest, all those sick kids, all the nurses in the ward, they died instantly in the blast, in the fire. It would have been painless. So much better than this awful shithole the rest of them are stuck in day after day after day. He sits on the sofa, tips his head back, and closes his eyes, imagining something like that for himself. He doesn’t deserve such a swift end, probably. But, he thinks it would be nice to close his eyes and know that he doesn’t have to open them again. The screaming would stop. The fear would stop. It would be nice, he thinks.

He opens his eyes.

Natasha stands by the boarded up window of the safehouse, arms folded, staring at it like she can stare through it. She’s not shaking. She’s _not shaking_ in such a pointed way, the stillness of her so deliberate, that he knows that shock is hitting her like mack truck.

“Natashka,” he says quietly, and a minute shudder runs through her.

“Don’t,” she says.

 _“Na-tash-ka,”_ he says again, more insistently this time, with an almost teasing tone. “We’ve got ages before they pick us up. C’mon.” He pats the sofa next to him. “C’mere.”

Reluctantly, she turns from the window. Her arms unfold and she crosses the room. With each step, he sees the exhaustion pull harder at her. She sits beside him, stiffly.

He yawns, stretches, slides his arm around behind her shoulders.

She gives him a look.

He waggles his eyebrows.

“Stop trying to make me feel better, I’m not going to feel better,” she tells him. But she still relaxes into him a bit. He curls his arm around her shoulders, tugs her in. She curls into his side, like she’s a kid again, and he turns her body, pulls her legs up and over his knees, so her head is against his shoulder, her legs across his lap.

She lets out a shuddery breath. She starts to shake.

“Talk to me?” he says, softly. It’s a request, she could say no.

She twists her face to press into his shoulder.

“C’mon sweetheart, you can tell me anything. It ain’t like I’m gonna remember.”

“That’s _awful,”_ she says, voice thick.

“True things usually are.”

She breathes in. She breathes out. When she speaks again, her voice is under control. “I think we were about five years old when they took us to Siberia. We’d already had some training, but they wanted us to train with the best. And it was a test. There were always tests.”

He rubs his hand up and down her spine.

“They told us all kinds of things about you." He sighs, because this is Natasha, redirecting. This is Natasha, talking about _him_ so they don't talk about  _her._ Well. If that's how she wants to play it. "They told us that you were the monster under the bed, that you ate the girls who didn’t obey, that you were a demon, a _domovoi,_ that if we behaved, you would protect us, but if we were bad, you would smother us in our sleep. We were so scared of you, but we knew better than to show it." Her voice is steady. She doesn't show fear now, either. "And then, before the briefing, they said: this is the truth. His name is Drakov Ilyich Baranovsky, he has made himself a monster to protect us, and he is going to teach you how.”

“Drakov, huh?” he says, so as not to linger on the phrase _made himself a monster,_  which fills him with something unspeakable, something vast and howling and terrible. “I don’t think I look much like a Drakov.”

“Maybe not. But that’s what they said,” she says. “And then they brought you in. And you started to teach us, and you were so… Your Russian was _atrocious,_ and you were so... _gentle,_ we couldn’t believe it. We thought it must be a trick. Another test. We drew lots and I won, so I got to sneak up on you--”

“Jesus, what the fuck were you thinkin'?”

“--and you nearly choked me to death, but you didn’t. And just for a second, you looked so scared, and so lost, and so _sad.”_

“I coulda _killed_ you,” he says, angry at her, even so long after the fact.

“Fine,” she says, like _oh my god, just let me talk._ “You looked scared, lost, sad, and _murderous.”_

He sighs, resignedly, letting his cheek rest against the top of her head. “Yeah, well. That’s the default setting.”

“I know,” she says. She pats his knee. “I know. Yelena was the same, after Sao Paulo.”

“What happened in Sao Paulo?”

“Oooh,” she says slowly. “You know. The usual.”

He squeezes her shoulders, rubs her bicep. He doesn’t know what happened in Sao Paulo, but he’s pretty damn sure there was nothing _usual_ about it.

“I remember,” she says slowly. “They said: he has no mother, no father. He is ageless and deathless. And this is what you will be.”

“I had a mother, and a father,” he says, with certainty.

“Do you remember them?” she asks, pulling back to look up.

His eyes unfocus, and he tries, but… “No.” He blinks, looks at her. “Do you remember yours?”

“I remember my father,” she says firmly.

“Alianovna, right?” he says. “So his name was Alian?”

“No,” she says.

It hits him then, like a bullet in the gut. “Oh, kiddo,” he says, thickly.

She elbows him in the ribs. “Shut up. We were all -- always Drakovna, to each other. We chose the name. We...” she stops. She starts to shake again, little quivers running through her. “I’m the only--the only one left-- the--”

“Shh, shh, shh,” he says, soothing, mindless. He gathers her closer to him, further into his lap and pets her hair. “I got you,” he says. “I got you. It's alright, sweetheart.”

That's a fucking lie, but it's all he's got. She hides her face in his shirt. She doesn't cry, but she does it again: three slow, controlled breaths. The shaking eases. “I'm the only one,” she whispers. “Drakov’s daughter--”

He swallows. He feels like an asshole for saying it, but: “I don't think it's that simple, kiddo…”

She pulls back. Her eyes are dry, her expression guarded. “Who do you want to be?” she asks, the words coming out of her easily -- more easily than any of her own stumbling recollections had.

He blinks. He doesn't know exactly the word for what he wants to offer.

It's not simple. It's not cut-and-dry. He's not her Papa -- she's not his daughter or his sister or his lover or… anything, really. They barely know each other, by any sane definition. They're none of those things, and more than those things, all at the same time. They defy definitions. Or perhaps -- they have had their definitions taken away.

“I don’t know, I...” he flounders, a bit.

Her mouth quivers. She surges forward, curls her arms around his neck and he stiffens for a minute, thinking --

But it's a hug. She holds onto him. He puts his arms around her and squeezes back.

“Mishka,” she says into his neck. “Just Mishka.”

“And Natashka,” he agrees.

For a moment they just breathe together, holding on. "Natashka… if you…” he pauses. He doesn’t know if he can ask this of her. Doesn’t know if he should.

She pulls back, holds onto his shoulders and stares at him, head tipped to one side. “You can ask for anything, Mishka.”

God, she’s good. She reads him like a book, and he’s not the easiest guy to read, even when he’s malfunctioning like this. “If you run." She will. He knows it. There is nothing to hold her here, now. "If they send me for you. After.”

She stiffens.

“Don’t fuckin’ hesitate, okay? You know I won’t.”

“Mishka…” she says quietly, brokenly.

“Please?” he says.

She closes her eyes, like he’s hurting her. But she nods.

He lets out a breath, relieved. “Okay. Okay.”

“I need to tell you something,” she says. She said that before, he remembers. Before he figured out that this was probably going to be their last mission together.

“Anything,” he says.

And the next moment she’s in his space again, intense and hard eyed. She holds his face between her hands. “I don’t know if you’ll remember this, but you need to know.” She says it fast, and low. “Even when you don’t remember, sometimes you know. The Cold War is over, the Russia they wanted us to fight for, the Russia they trained us to protect, that’s not what they’re using us for now. They’ll say you’re a protector. They are lying. We are not protecting people anymore. I don’t know if we ever were.”

Something inside him shifts out of place. A word ( _Один,_ his one purpose, he is a protector, a _protector)_ unlocks and falls away. He twitches hard all over, shakes his head.

“It’s true,” she says, tightening her hold on him. She is Field Command, no one else could shift his programming like that. “And there’s more. Your file says you were born in Kiev in ‘78, but that’s a lie. I know it’s a lie. There are files on you going back at least ‘64. They call you the American. You talk like an American. You sound like you’re from Brooklyn.”

 _Brooklyn, Brooklyn, Brooklyn._ It rings him like a bell. It tastes like hot dogs and it smells like hot garbage, the docks, brylcream and cigarette smoke and exhaust and--

“Try to get back to America, if you can,” she says, holding his face tight. “Maybe it will help you break the programming. Maybe someone there can help you. Mishka. Do you understand me? Will you remember?”

“No,” he says, and the loss is all through him. He is hollow inside, like a bell. He is hollowed out. They have carved out everything inside. There is nothing left. He is no one.

“Of course not,” she says drily. “It’s alright. You don’t have to remember. I’ll remember for you.”

He wipes his face with his flesh hand. It comes away damp.

“Ah what’s this now?” she asks softly. She wipes his cheeks and tsks. “I can’t believe they thought they could make a Russian out of you. Look at this. You’re a mess.”

He blinks at her, and feels his mouth lift on one side. “Yeah, I’m a lost cause.”

“Come on. Let’s get cleaned up before the extraction team gets here.”

 

Back at base, the others have little celebratory glasses of vodka with the Widow as they put him back in the tank. Karpov looks sour. Madame B looks smug. Natasha’s face is blank, unreadable. It is the last thing he sees. She sips the vodka and doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t look away from him as the glass frosts over.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up.

He collapses on the concrete. There is no one to catch him, to hold him up as he defrosts. He is irritated by that. He’s gonna have fuckin’ bruises. Thanks assholes.

Somewhere, his Handler is saying the words. Fast, panicky. He writhes and twitches on the floor, growls and shouts as the programming kicks in hard and fast. It _hurts_.

And then it’s over. He’s lying on his back, panting at the ceiling. This is against protocol.

“Доброе утро, Солдат.”

“Я готов отвечать,” he says to the ceiling. _Asswipe,_  he thinks. The bruises ache and itch as they start to heal almost immediately.

“Up,” the Handler says, fast, and in English. “Get up, Soldat. We’re leaving.”

He sounds afraid. The Soldier knows the feeling. He almost pities the guy. But also. Getting up hurts. He’s still shaking from the defrost, still weak. The Handler throws his tac gear at him, and it takes him a minute to realize that he is going to have to equip himself. This is not procedure. This is not how things are done. They are off the rails here; even if he can’t really remember, he knows this isn’t right. It fills him with anxiety, a tight, uncomfortable feeling. But, nonetheless, he starts pulling on the gear.

“Here’s your goddamn debrief, Soldat. The fucking Widow fucking defected, and Madame B is pinning it on me. So you and I are leaving. Understood?”

“Да,” he agrees, in Russian, as it should be. English is another wrongness.

“And for once you speak Russian, you contrary motherfucker,” the Handler grumbles. The Soldier does not understand this, so he ignores it. “We’ve got a window. You’re going to take me to the chopper, we’re getting out of here.”

“Куда мы идем?” _Where are we going?_

“I have not a single fucking clue, Soldat.”

This mission is fucked up.

“Where do you wanna go, huh?” The Handler -- Karpov. The handler’s name is Karpov. He asks the question, but it is in a tone that suggests that he doesn’t expect an answer. Sometimes they ask him things like this, he knows, without really remembering a specific instance of it. They ask meanly. He is not supposed to answer. That is part of the joke. And then they laugh. Perhaps Karpov wants to laugh at his inability to answer.

Too fucking bad, pal. “Запад,” the Soldier says, keeping his eyes down. _The West._ He says it in Russian. Russian is compliant. “Америка,” he adds, for clarity.

The Handler snorts. “Yeah, I bet you fucking do.” But then, the Handler freezes. His eyes narrow. “America,” he says, slower. Speculative. “Pierce would probably take you. He’s wanted you for years.”

The Soldier doesn’t know why he suggested America. It makes sense, tactically. The Russian division doesn’t like working with the American division, so if they are defecting from the Russians, it makes sense to go to the Americans. And some of his equipment was developed in America. The Chair is American, the Soldier can tell by some of its components. The Tank, too. And there are bases there, bases that are equipped to handle him. America is a sound, tactical choice.

But that isn’t why he suggests it. He doesn’t remember why he suggests it.

But it tastes like victory.

 

* * *

 

He wakes in a different place. The uniforms are ones that he _recognizes,_  but they are not _familiar._ There are lots of guns. There is a blond man. He is older, and handsome, and thoughtful.

“Welcome home, Soldier,” he says.

These are not the words. (The words?) His gaze darts around. They do not have the book. (The book?)

“I'm your new handler. Your old handler, Karpov, has traded you to us in exchange for a new life here in America.” The blond man is watching him closely. This is a test. He must be compliant. He cannot react to this. Reacting is noncompliant.

The Soldier stares, blank and expressionless. He reveals nothing, but...

The Soldier is… kind of offended actually. The Handler. The old handler. Karpov. He had fond feelings about that name. Something about. Christmas. He had felt protective of that handler. And the handler had abandoned him to these motherfuckers. Americans. _Capitalists._

But.

They don’t have the book. (What fucking book?) They haven’t said the words. (What goddamn words?) He doesn’t remember the words or the book, but he knows that there should be a book, and words. Karpov must have taken them. Insurance. That would be tactically sound. Perhaps these people do not know about the book or the words.

He looks around again. The soldiers. Their guns. The Chair. It is all strange. New. His body doesn't know any of this. His head certainly doesn't fucking remember shit. He suddenly feels how vulnerable he is here. The tang of fear fills his mouth.

He remains blank and expressionless. Showing the fear that he feels (all the fuckin’ time) is noncompliant.

“We have work for you here,” the blond man says. He’s got a strong chin, blue eyes, a small, serious mouth. The Soldier likes these features. He’s not sure why, exactly. They tickle some part of his brain. “Hydra has work for you here. It is a dangerous time. A dangerous time for freedom.” It is making echoes in his head. Blonde hair blue eyes serious expression, _freedom, liberty, justice. “I can’t just do nothing, Buck--”_ “We need you. We need your help. There’s a lot of work to be done. Soldier’s work. Freedom needs a protector. Will you do this for us?”

 _Son of a bitch, here we go again,_ he thinks, without knowing why. _Alright Captain Asshole,_ says a voice in his head, weary, like he’s tired. He only just woke up.

None of it makes any sense. He looks at this man, who talks about freedom, being a protector, and it makes him think of someone else, but it’s wrong, wrong, _wrong._ It doesn’t ring true. He is probably malfunctioning.

But what can he do? He feels every inch of his own vulnerability. There is nothing in his head, only fear. They have all the power. He has nothing. He is nothing.

But the body knows what the mind does not remember. The body knows the right thing to say. The body knows how to be compliant.

“Я готов отвечать,” he says.

The Handler smiles, and the Soldier feels terror choke him. He has learned, by now, not to let it show.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to know what happens to Natasha between this chapter and the next [there’s a B-Side for that.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15845442/chapters/41580947)
> 
> Notes:  
> Apres Moi is one of my all time favorite songs, in or out of this playlist. Second of all to everyone who ever asked about my writing process, May I Direct Your Attention To The Title Of This Chapter.
> 
> if anyone is remotely interested, this whole chapter was basically built around the very few teasing lines we have about Natasha's backstory. Loki says "Drakov's daughter? Sao Paulo? The Hospital Fire?" and in a deleted scene from TWS, Pierce says "the children's ward." Put it all together and what do you get? this chapter, basically. in my headcanon, those are three things she told Barton and no one else: 1) that she considers herself Drakovna, not Alianovna, 2) whatever happened in Sao Paulo, and 3) that time she blew up a hospital full of sick children because she'd been sent to kill her best friend.
> 
> Finally, thanks to everyone who reads and comments and thanks especially to Pegasuschick who for some reason still puts up with me. I am So Sorry to cause y'all this Pain.  
> on the bright(?) side -- next week is 1) a double chapter update, and 2) gonna happen early, because I'm going out of town. So expect two chapters to drop on or around Infinity War Day.
> 
> Meanwhile, come scream at me [on tumblr](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/)


	7. In the Dark I Have No Name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Add tag: Attempted Hydra Trash Party, (foiled by Bucky’s stunningly deadly startle reflex)

## 7

 _Shelter also gave their shade_  
_But **in the dark I have no name**_

_-[Hopeless Wanderer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rId6PKlDXeU) by Mumford & Sons, 2012._

 

He has had many names.

Now they mostly call him the Asset, because he is surrounded by soldiers, so calling him “Soldier” gets confusing. And calling him “Soldat,” as the Russians did, draws attention. Calling him “Asset” makes him feel even further from himself, somehow. Like he’s sitting somewhere just outside himself, watching a movie about himself. He doesn’t think of this as a good or bad thing; it is what it is. Being an Asset isn’t a job given to human people, but that’s appropriate. It’s been a long time since he was a human person.

The Soldier thinks, sometimes, about vehicles: cars, trains, boats. When they are putting in the feeding tube, he thinks about gasoline, about being filled up, about running on fumes. When he is on the table, he thinks about being jacked up in the air, a mechanic checking all his parts, making sure he will still run. When they put him in scanners, in x-ray machines, making pictures of what’s inside, he thinks of looking under the hood. When they take his blood, for testing, he thinks of checking the oil. They need to know how he works, to make sure he’ll still function.

They change the oil. They add something to the gas. They put him under and tinker with the engine block. He only knows they have done that because he wakes up with his head shaved and his whole skull tender.

Frankenstein, he thinks. The word bubbles up without context, without meaning. It’s gone the next time they wipe him, and whatever they tried to do inside his skull, it --

Doesn’t take.

He’s very disoriented and sluggish for about twenty four hours -- and then he collapses and --

Whatever they tried, they don’t try again. His skull is no longer tender the next time he comes out of the ice.

Even so, he is erratic. (This is what they were trying to fix.) He used to know why that was, but he has forgotten now, and they never let him out long enough to remember anything. He is erratic. Unstable. And so:

They wipe him when he comes out of the ice. They wipe him every three days like clockwork, whether he needs it or not. They wipe him before they put him back into the ice. The power requirements must be enormous. The Soldier vaguely registers that this is wasteful -- there is programming deep down, underneath all the other layers, that cringes from such wastefulness -- but they don’t seem to care. Americans. _Capitalists._

They wipe him again.

They wipe him again.

He tries to think about being a car, about being wiped down, about washing and waxing, about being clean. But that isn’t what this is. This is a wreck. The car is totaled. He is rebuilt from the pieces after every wipe.

 

* * *

 

They start to send him on missions. He has many handlers now. Many eyes watching his moves. Many hands moving him around the board. They never leave him alone. There are many handlers who don’t matter. There is one Handler who does matter. He is older, handsome for an older man. His voice -- familiar. His hair, blond peppered with grey. His eyes, blue. His face is earnest, full of belief, of sincerity. His words ring with conviction.

It is an echo of something. It rings inside the Soldier, and he echoes long after the Handler has left the room. He echoes with an urge to _do better_ to _be better._ He wants to make this man proud of him. And not just because there will be pain if he does not.

 

Most of the other handlers are beyond stupid. The Russians had protocols for managing him, protocols which evidently did not get passed along to the Americans.

The first handler who tries to put her hand down his pants gets her arm broken in three places and her neck snapped in one. He doesn’t even think about it. She just surprised him, and he doesn’t react well to that kind of thing.

He gets reset _hard_ after that, because the Americans don’t do punishments the way the Russians did. He isn’t a dog that needs training, he is a machine that needs to be rebooted.

 

The second handler who _surprises_ him is some doe-eyed kid. The kid is supposed to be his spotter, but he keeps fucking _staring_ with goddamn _stars in his eyes,_ like he fucking _knows something._

It sets the Soldier’s teeth on edge.

When they’re packing up, after, the kid says: “Sir, can I just -- you’re my hero, you know?”

The Soldier freezes. This is not protocol. Adrenaline floods his system, alarm and fear making the back of his neck feel suddenly clammy. He mustn’t let it show. He doesn’t know the proper response to this. He risks a sidelong look at the kid.

“People always idealized Captain America, but you -- you did the dirty work. You were the one who got the job _done,_ and that’s… I mean, I don’t know if I’d be here if it wasn’t for you. Doing what’s gotta be done, that’s… That’s real heroism, you know?”

His eyes are so wide, so fucking _sincere._ The Soldier doesn’t know what to make of it. He stares at the kid. What the fuck is he supposed to say?

And who the _fuck_ is Captain America?

“Can I--” the kid stops, chews his bottom lip. Then he.

He tips his head down, looks up with his gaze hooded and full of _meaning_ and--

“Anything you want, sir?”

This is a question. _Answer._ That’s an imperative. **_Answer._ ** “No,” the Soldier answers, mechanically.

“It’s okay, sir, I can--” The kid steps closer, licks his lips, and _reaches--_

The Soldier reacts.

Grab the arm, twist, pull, throw his body weight into it, and the next instant the kid is up on his toes, arm twisted up behind him, crying out in pain and alarm. The Soldier’s hand is on his neck and--

Fuck. Shit. _Fuck,_  this is a _handler--_

The Soldier releases at once, steps back, chest heaving. He should say-- “sorry, sorry, sorry, please, don’t--”

Fuck, no, don’t say that -- those aren’t the fucking -- those aren’t the _words,_ he’s a goddamn -- _handler--_

He takes another step away, and another. His back hits the wall of the safehouse. _Be still, Soldier._

The kid is watching. Eyes wide, taking shuddery breaths. “Jesus,” he says. “Fuck you, man, you coulda just said no.”

He _did_ say no, though. “Command unclear,” he says, voice steady, and monotone despite his rabbiting heart.

“Fuck.” The handler rolls his shoulder. Not dislocated, not broken, but maybe strained. “Okay, let’s just. Pretend _that_ never fucking happened. Sound good, _Soldat?”_

The Soldier blinks a couple of times. What the fuck does he-- what should he _say?_ “Я готов отвечать,” he says, blank as he can.

“Yeah, sure you are,” the guy grumbles, still probing his injured shoulder. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”

 

The last handler who startles him gets him alone in the prep room and starts unzipping his fly and -- well, to be honest the Soldier isn’t sure what the plan was after that, because that’s when he panics, puts his metal fist around the guy’s neck, and crushes his windpipe with one spasmodic squeeze.

Whoops.

He. Didn’t mean to do that. But it wasn’t part of procedure. He was startled, that’s all. And now… well.

He’s killed a handler again. And that’s -- that’s not good at all.

He’s too fucking scared to do anything but stand and stare while the guy suffocates with his pants around his thighs. And then he has wait twenty more minutes until someone comes to check on him and figures out what happens.

They report the incident to the Handler -- to Pierce, the Handler who actually matters. The Soldier expects to be punished, but…

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Pierce says, looking up from the report he was given. The rest of the team wears black tactical gear, but the Handler stands out in his neat suit and tie.

“No, sir,” says the officer who found him. Rumlow, Brock. Field Command, not a handler. Because the Soldier killed the handler.

Not good.

The Soldier is in the Chair, waiting for punishment, trying not to panic. He is not succeeding, but he feels confident that no one realizes that he is panicking. He has the sense that he is well-practiced in keeping still, keeping quiet, keeping his focus when all he wants to do is find a very small, very quiet, very secure space and squeeze himself into it.

The rest of STRIKE is standing around with their guns pointed at him. At least _that’s_ part of procedure. At least _that_ makes sense.

“Did you know about this?” Pierce asks Rumlow.

“No sir,” Rumlow says, but the set of his shoulders is--

Pierce lowers the report and glares. “But you suspected.”

Rumlow makes a face, somewhat disgusted. “All due respect, sir, Markowitz was an idiot.”

“Did _you_ know about this?” Pierce says, turning on the lead tech. “Has this happened before?”

The tech gives the STRIKE team a look. There is always some animosity between the techs and the operatives. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Given the way they talk sometimes.”

A couple of the STRIKE team members glare at him. 

“It’s a high stress--” Rumlow starts to protest, but he’s cut off.

“For _god’s sake,”_ Pierce rages, not at the Soldier, but at the others. “This is a _workplace,_  not a goddamn bordello. I can’t believe I have to give this lecture. Jesus Christ. You want to get your rocks off, I don’t give a damn, but if you put your dick in a blender, you’re going to _lose your dick._ This--” he points at the Soldier “--is a _tactical asset,_ not a sex toy. Understood?”

The STRIKE team looks _extremely_ uncomfortable. But they stand to attention and shout assent as ordered.

Pierce shoves the report back into Rumlow’s hands. “You’re in command now. Wipe him. Start over. This is going to set the timeline back at least ten hours.”

 

* * *

 

No one touches him after that, except for maintenance.

Even so, half the time when someone lays hands on him, they get thrown or bitten, so.

They add restraints to the Chair: straps for holding, for containment. (He is not in the driver's seat. He is a passenger, strapped in. He is just along for the ride.)

They add a mask to his gear.

 

* * *

 

The Asset comes online. It is 2009. They are on a submarine in the Black Sea. They come to the surface, and release the Asset into the night air with a whole team of handlers. The Asset thinks of octopuses, squelching out of the sea onto a beach, slick and raw looking. Repulsive, but if you dared come close enough, would they even be able to hurt you? If you dared to go after it, to step on it, wouldn’t it just burst like a slug?

The Asset has a target. A scientist. Would be a soft target, but the target has a protector, and the protector is well trained.

The target makes it all the way to Odessa, but the Asset knows which way they will go. The Asset knows the road they must take. The Asset knows the shot he needs, the angle, the distance. The Asset chooses a position, and the handlers take him there. They put the equipment into the Asset’s hands. They make a sniper’s blind, and the handlers stand by, waiting. Watching.

The shot should be impossible, which is the only reason the target’s protector has not thought to avoid it. The protector is a Widow -- _was_ a Widow. She would not be so careless as to take the Target on a route vulnerable to snipers. But this shot… no one has ever made a shot like this. The Asset is unbothered by that thought. That is perhaps the only thing that _doesn’t_ scare him.

The car comes around the bend. Moving fast. An impossible shot.

He makes it. Of course. Puts a bullet in the back tire. He can't hear the pop from this side of the ravine, but he watches. The car veers wildly, losing control. It skids, rolls, off the road, and over a cliff. And at the last minute --

The back door bursts open. A blur, and then -- a shape, rolling out of the back, hitting the dirt hard and rolling. Two figures, bundled together. One holding onto the other. They roll and bounce on the dirt road, battered but alive, and free of the car, which careens over the cliffside and topples end over end towards the water below.

“Fuck,” says the Asset, the breath of the word hot in his mask, humid against his face. He lines up for a second shot. The Target is there, on the ground, he recognizes the beard, the glint of the man's glasses. The Widow maneuvers, puts her body between him and the target, but he can see the target's legs, the angle of his back where it curves. He knows where the man's head will be, covered by the Widow's body. 

A difficult shot. His head clears, just for a moment. He adjusts the angle. No time to breathe, just

aim

and

fire.

He puts a bullet into the target, through the Widow. Her body goes tense, then slack as the pain hits. He can see her back heaving, hitching. She twists around. She's checking her mark, seeing where he's hit.

And then she's rolling away. If the Widow is abandoning the mark she was supposed to protect, then the Target is dead. Mission accomplished.

 **Leave no witnesses,** the programming tells him.

He takes aim. The Widow is trying to crawl away. She's wearing a loose white tunic, rapidly staining with red, and loose trousers that are starting to be smeared with dirt and dust from the road. She twists, pulls at the colorful headscarf she was wearing. It had kept her incognito, he supposes, but now it's just getting in the way. She tears it off, and her hair is bright coppery red, an easy target to focus on, but-- 

Red hair…

It bounces hard off something in the back of his head. Like a bullet. It ricochets around the dark inside him and bangs against hidden things -- a bony wrist in his hand, feet swinging in ballet shoes, a smile, a head thrown back in laughter. A scrap of a melody, uncertain and brief.

His head comes away from the scope. The Arm unlocks, and he drops the rifle. It’s like the bullet is still bouncing around in his skull, flashes of memory lighting up like grenades. A dusty, rubble-strewn floor, and his body moving in time to a beat. He lurches back from the gun. Five little faces, fixed on him, wide eyed and unafraid.

“Soldat?” says one of the handlers. Sometimes they use Russian when giving him orders. Sometimes it helps if they use Russian, makes it easier to follow the orders.

Not this time.

There is rushing, pounding in his ears, and the scream in his head is closer than ever, louder than ever. Everything is static. Broken images, half-remembered. Sensation of hair in his fingers, braiding, making the braids lie flat. Fine strands, bright as a penny. Eyes like sea glass. A small body, a bigger body.

A small body, a _huge_ body. Blond hair. Blue eyes.

“Soldat, what are you--”

He staggers. The knee goes -- first the left, then the right. The arms are numb. The heart is pounding. He is shaking. The Arm stutters on calibration, trying to respond to commands from a brain that is -- he is --

 

* * *

 

He overhears:

A woman in a white coat, a man in a black coat. Talking over him. Listen. _Pay attention, Soldier._

“--lost the fucking Widow because they were too busy hauling his comatose ass back to base,” the black coat is saying. “We cannot have that happen twice.”

“We can add more uppers, but that won’t fix the problem,” says the white coat.

“He collapsed on mission, I don’t think _sedatives_ are the solution,” says the black coat.

“Well, I can’t promise that he didn’t collapse from exhaustion but… listen. Look at these scans, alright? Parts of the brain are just completely dark, but the amygdala, parts of the hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens, they’re all working overtime. And look at this bloodwork. I mean--”

“What are you telling me, doctor?”

“I’m telling you that you need to add some serious anti-anxiety meds to his cocktail.”

The black coat laughs. “You’re telling me he’s _scared?”_

“I’m telling you he’s probably having a panic attack right now, and just masking the symptoms.”

Masking. _Haaaaaaa,_ thinks a rusty part of the Asset’s brain. It’s a high, shrill sound. Hysterical.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“Biology is ridiculous. Look, if you wanted a robot, you shouldn’t have used human parts. Human parts are inconvenient, and full of messy chemicals. And his chemicals? Are the most messed up I’ve ever fucking seen.”

“So we’ve got a killing machine that needs a goddamn Xanax?”

_“Yeah.”_

“Jesus Christ.”

“I don’t he’s in the building right now.”

They laugh.

 

* * *

 

They take everything from him, even his fear. There is something in the IV they put into him. It takes the fear away. Fear is the last thing to go, and the first to start coming back, but without the fear, there is nothing left inside except for the thin, distant screaming. It is very far away. Easy to ignore.

 

* * *

 

In 2010, there is an attempted coup.

This is unsurprising. 2010 is a disastrous year for Hydra. They failed to acquire the Iron Man weapon, and they failed to replicate it. They failed to capture the Hulk, and Blonsky was useless to them. They failed to capture either the _alien prince_ or the _giant fiery deathbot._

Jesus Christ. What a year.

So some idiots decided that maybe it was time for new management.

The Handler is not an idiot, and so, when the rogue Hydra Agents (STRIKE team rejects, all of ‘em) arrive at Pierce’s house, the Asset is there. Waiting.

There are twenty of them, one of him.

It is not a fair fight, because they are afraid and he

isn’t.

His head is clear. There is only his breath, the beat of his heart, the whine of the Arm. The thump of metal on flesh. The crack of gunfire. Pain happens. His pain, other people’s pain, it doesn’t matter. All the same. Sounds happen, the screaming is sometimes in his head, sometimes not in his head, all the same. All meaningless.

He sees an opening

he _takes it_

and

he

never

hesitates.

 

When it’s over, he steps through the bodies to let the target out of his panic room. The Handler -- Pierce, Alexander -- looks at ease among the carnage, despite his soft clothes, his mussed hair. He does not step in the blood, but he does not look disgusted. He puts his hands in his pockets. He nods.

“Good work, Soldier.”

The Asset breathes in. Breathes out. Praise. He lifts his chin, ignores the ache in his shoulder. There are burns where the overheated metal touches his skin. The motors inside are whirring, trying to cool down, a high-pitched whine. An animal sound, but coming from the machine part of him. The bones ache deep down. Microfractures. He hit too hard. But he did

_Good work, Soldier_

So who cares?

The Handler is watching him. Has he done something wrong?

“You want a drink?” he asks. Like a test.

The Soldier blinks. He swallows. His throat is dry.

“Yes,” he says.

It is the wrong thing to say.

 

He does not remember what happens after that, does not remember what the punishment was, in the end. And that, more than anything else, scares him.

 

* * *

 

They change what goes into the IV, after that.

“It’s a balance,” he hears one of the techs explaining, once. “Not enough and we lose functionality. Too much and suddenly he’s not afraid of _anything_ anymore, and that’s--”

“Bad. Because why listen to the handlers if you’re not scared of them?”

“Got it in one.”

“So why not just use the same dose as last time?”

A heavy sigh. “Serum fucks with our reckoning. He’s basically addicted to the stuff, yeah? But his healing factor is off the charts. And there are environmental factors… you just have to keep an eye on it.”

“Doesn’t sound very efficient. Is it really worth the--”

“Don’t ask that unless you want to see the Asset in action, up close and personal.”

 

* * *

 

The Asset comes online. They defrost the meat. They fill the tank. They check the oil.

Then, the wipe.

They give him the gear. The mask, the goggles. He is muzzled. They take away the face. They take away the fear. The Asset is ready for a mission.

“Come, this way,” says the Handler. The blond man, the only Handler who matters. Pierce, Alexander.

The Asset follows. They are in a bunker, deep. Concrete on all sides. The Asset can hear nothing through the walls. They must be very deep indeed. “You’re with me,” Pierce says. “If this goes south, we might need you.”

What? What might go south? He doesn’t need to know, he supposes.

They come into a room, a room full of screens, of monitors. Guards. Dark room. Flickering screens.

“How are we doing?” says Pierce.

“The World Security Council just ordered the missile,” a tech reports. He notices the Asset, and jumps.

“Bodyguard,” Pierce says. “Don’t mind him. What’s the situation on the ground?” Pierce leans over to look at the monitors. “Get me live footage.”

“We can’t pin down Iron Man while he’s in the air,” (Anthony Edward Stark, wearing an armored exoskeleton with advanced weapons tech -- the Asset has been briefed.) "Hawkeye is on a rooftop here,” the tech continues, pointing to a glowing spot on a map. (Clinton Francis Barton, expert marksman -- the Asset  almost feels a twinge of. Something. _I’m better. I could be better if I wasn’t stuck with this fucking hunk of junk on my--)_ “We lost the Widow, we think she’s at Stark Tower.” (The Widow -- the _Widow --_ The -- _red hair, seaglass eyes, a smirk, a thin wrist, ballet shoes --_ Malfunction. Ignore.)

“What about the Hulk?’

 _(Shouldn’t have tried to make the Serum that way, coulda fucking told you if you’d bothered to fucking ask, but_ nooo.)

“He’s… all over the place,” the tech says, resigned. “Can’t get reliable visuals, but we’re tracking him as best we can.”

Pierce sighs in irritation. “Well what _can_ you show me?”

“We’ve got the captain and the alien.”

“Put them on the screen.”

The tech pulls up live footage.

Two men are fighting side by side. There are plenty of aliens around, to be sure. Slavering bug-faced things with guns blasting blue light instead of bullets. Neat. Weird, but neat. The CCTV camera they’ve hacked obviously isn’t focused on the aliens (why not? They are aliens. _Fucking aliens.)_ The camera zooms in on the two men. These must be the alien and the captain. Neither one looks like an alien, and neither one looks like a captain. One is wearing _armor_ with a _cape_ and carrying a _hammer,_ and yet he still manages to be the less stupid-looking one.

The other one is--

He takes a blast to the gut. He falls forward, dirty blond hair falling over his forehead, bracing himself, trying to catch his breath. The one in the cape uses his hammer to flip a car into the aliens, then throws it and offers a hand up to the stupid-looking one. The stupid-looking one takes it. There is a profile, a crooked nose, a stubborn fucking chin.

 _Hey punk. Where ya been?_ The words echo around his empty head. They don’t mean anything. He ignores them. He thinks, maybe, he should feel something. But there’s nothing inside him. Nothing at all.

The handler -- Pierce -- is watching him. Why?

“Soldat,” Pierce says, sharp and low. The Russian hooks into something in the Asset’s subconscious and pulls. A hook. A line. A sinker. Pierce jerks his head to the door and the Asset understands. He is to guard and not to watch.

He follows the order.

 

Later, after the missile goes up, up, away, after the hole in the sky closes, after the aliens drop down dead and Iron Man falls from the sky, Pierce leaves the room, with its monitors and techs.

“You. With me,” says Pierce.

The Asset follows, out the way they came, but they go past the room with the Tank and the Chair. They go to another room: small, empty, save for a desk and a phone. Pierce jerks his chin, and the Asset understands, he is to watch the door.

He goes outside, puts himself in front of the closed door.  Through it, he can hear Pierce making a phone call.

He wonders if Pierce knows that the Asset can hear through doors.

“Nick,” Pierce says, voice low and urgent. “I just heard that the World Security Council is calling for a--”

“It’s taken care of,” says a voice. (Fury, Nicholas J. Colonel, US Army. Intelligence Officer, CIA. Director, SHIELD.) “Iron Man redirected the Security Council’s assets. Black Widow just closed the portal. The situation is contained.”

“Thank fuck,” Pierce mutters. “Jesus. Those assholes. What the hell were they thinking?”

Fury growls. “You’re assuming they were thinking. They were just reacting -- panicking.”

“By dropping a nuke on Manhattan? That’s a hell of a panic attack.”

“You’re telling me.”

There’s a long pause. “This was too close, Nick,” Pierce says.

“I know.” Fury’s voice crackles down the line, coming from somewhere far away. Helicarrier, the Asset knows.

“I mean, thank God your little gamble paid off. Clearly it was worth the resources, keeping tabs on them like that, but, ah…”

Fury gives a short, bitter laugh. “An old friend of mine used to say--” The old friend is Pierce. The Asset can tell this from the expression on Pierce’s face “--the opposing team always ups their game.”

“And we can’t afford to be caught on the back foot like that again,” Pierce agrees. His expression is focused, something between eager and wary.

The Asset has had intelligence training. He can tell, because he knows that Pierce already knows all of this, that Director Fury is being led somewhere. Somewhere deliberate.

“If I’m going to keep ahead of homeworld defense, I’m going to need a quantum surge in threat analysis,” Fury says. “Something beyond anything the world has seen before. We almost weren’t quick enough this time, I don’t want to wait this long next time.” Fury is building a head of steam now. This idea -- he thinks it’s his, but the Asset knows: the seeds of this idea were planted, and not by him.

“You’re not wrong, but… well, there’s a limit, Nick,” Pierce says. “It’s not like we can stop threats before they happen.”

There’s a pause. A significant one. “Why not?” says Fury.

And that’s it, the Asset knows. That’s the moment when Pierce gets what he wants. He’s smiling.

“Predictive technology?” Pierce says. "That's a fantasy. How would you even--”

“We’ve got the whole internet. There’s got to be a way to mine it for what we need, like we mined surveillance and cell phones to find Loki.”

“Some kind of an algorithm, maybe,” Pierce says, nodding. “I know a guy who can help us with that.”

“That won’t be enough. It’ll need firepower too, and mobility.”

“The Helicarrier?” Pierce suggests. “With some upgrades, maybe.”

“I know a guy who can help us with that,” Fury says, satisfied.

Pierce blows out a long breath. “This is going to take some doing, Nick. This is going to take years.”

“We need it,” Fury says. “I don’t want to go into another disaster like this blind. I need eyes in the sky, I need--”

“Insight?” Pierce suggests.

The Asset has gotten very good at reading his handlers. He can tell when they are disappointed, when they are angry. And he can tell -- like now -- when they are deeply, deeply satisfied.

 

Pierce and Fury go back and forth for a while longer, but soon the conversation is over and Pierce comes out. The Asset stands aside, and Pierce gives him a look, contemplative. “You want a drink?” he asks. He says it like a test.

The Asset does not understand.  He doesn’t reply.

“I want a drink,” Pierce says, and waves for the Asset to follow him back into the office. “You’ve seen history being made here today,” he says. “You know that?”

The Asset does not understand. So he doesn’t reply.

“It’s all coming to a head now. Your work and mine, coming together. We’ve shaped the century, you and I. But soon now… soon our work will be done.”

The Asset doesn’t reply. He knows better than to show what he feels -- the _relief_ that he feels. He is not supposed to want things, he knows it. But he wants that. He _wants that._  He wants to be done. He wants this to be over.

Pierce is watching him. He’s pouring a drink, and he sips it without taking his eyes off the Asset. “Not much longer now, Soldier. I promise.”

The Asset believes him. It's not like they're going to stop until they accomplish their goals, and…

He doesn’t remember -- doesn’t _quite_ remember. But he knows. He can hear it in his head, in a voice that isn’t his own, isn’t _quite_ Pierce’s either.

 _It ain’t gonna stop in Vienna._ He doesn't know what happened in Vienna, or why it's important, but that's what the voice says. It says _It ain't gonna stop in Vienna,_ and then it says: _They’re bullies. They won’t stop until someone makes them._

And who's going to make them? Who _can,_ now?

So the Soldier believes it, and the believing makes an empty place inside him. He didn't think he had anything left to lose, but turns out he was wrong about that.

 _Pandora’s box._ It arrives in the mind without context, without understanding, but the Soldier knows this. Pandora’s box, with all the horrors inside. They escaped, the horrors. They flooded out into the world, screaming and howling and poisonous until the box was almost as hollow as he is now.

Pandora’s box. It wouldn’t be truly empty until hope escaped.

 

 

 

 

 

## Coda

_-[Winter 3 (NYPC remix)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1cuICaPGrk) From “Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Four Seasons (Deluxe Version)” by Max Richter & NYPC, 2014._

 

He doesn’t wake up anymore. They just switch him on.

It.

The Asset.

The Asset comes online.

They defrost it like so much meat left out to thaw. They take it out of storage and turn on the parts and run their checks, looking for bugs, for glitches. Tune up. They put in the feeding tube. They put in the IV. _Fill ‘er up. Check the oil._

When it's strong enough, Mission prep. The Chair. The Wipe. Sounds like a car wreck: shattering, twisting metal, a crash, a scream. There’s no one in the driver’s seat, just broken things and pain.

But, pain is part of the Asset. The Asset is erratic. The Asset requires order, and order only comes through pain.

When the Asset has recovered from mission prep, they give it the gear. Gear with straps. For grabbing, for holding. For restraint, if necessary.

There is a muzzle for the face. The Asset will bite, if they do not follow procedure. There are goggles for the eyes, and it helps, to have a veil between the eyes and the rest of the world. It helps the Asset, and it helps the handlers, the technicians.

They are all easier once the mask and the goggles are on. More comfortable. It is easier for them to remember procedure when the mask and the goggles are on. They remember not to make eye contact. They remember the correct procedures, the commands. They do not hesitate when it is time to hand over a gun, and they do not forget that sometimes guns must be leveled at the Asset.

In a shiny black computer screen, the Asset catches a glimpse of the reflection--

He catches a glimpse--

The Asset has no face. Faces are for people. The Asset is not a person. It’s better for everyone when the Asset is not a person. People cannot do what the Asset needs to do.

"We have a mission for you. Level Six Target. Fury, Nicholas J."

 

* * *

 

Later, he does the math. He was always pretty good at math.

One long fall, ten years of brainwashing, one pretty gruesome surgical modification, thirty-nine missions, six months, perhaps twelve training the Widows, the other Winter Soldiers...

Seven decades is a long, long time. If you’re awake for all of it. But time fuckin’ flies if you can only be out for three days before needing a wipe or an icy nap.

The world has had seventy years, but the Asset hasn’t.

In some ways, the Asset was only about seven years old when he hears…

 

* * *

 

_Bucky?_

_Who the hell is Bucky?_

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey Friends. If you're binging this, and you haven't taken a break yet, now is the perfect time to do that. The next part of the series will still be there, and you're still a long ass way from that reunion you're dying to read about.
> 
> If, on the other hand, you're reading this As I Post It and you're Dying Inside, today is a Double Update Day and I already posted the first chapter of Part Four: Fool For Sacrifice.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/) and [dreamwidth](https://girlbookwrm.dreamwidth.org/) \-- don’t forget to check out The Hundred Year Playlist [Playlist on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4cO5vrDvCKErHEPtudEmEy) (if that’s a thing you do) and [the ficliography](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/post/178668783737/i-do-recommend-these-fics-but-this-isnt) [which is also on Dreamwidth because I Do Not Trust Tumblr Anymore](https://girlbookwrm.dreamwidth.org/tag/ficliography%22).


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